The review slipped past me this week. A little food poisoning will do that to a person. But I’m kicking again.
A Quick Summary
The RSS/News Feed section of the app has been built and put into action. So if you pull the latest code and run the application, navigate into the news section you’ll get the Basho Blog feed. This definitely needs cleaned up a bit from the UI perspective but the main elements are there.
Next steps are…
One of the things the team is aiming to knock out next is to get some MVVM (Mode View ViewModel) architecture setup to build against versus what we’ve started with, which is just the basic skeleton of things thrown together. It works, but it’ll be nice to have some clean architecture behind the application to work with.
I’m aiming to put together a blog entry on troubleshooting the build server for Junction and also the how-to on setting up the RSS/News Feed Reader section of the app in the coming week also. Subscribe to keep up with the latest in Junction news and also all the other tidbits on the blog. Cheers!
It’s time for another Tuesday Bi-weekly Review! We’ve been making some progress and so far we’ve tackled a few elements of the project. The first big task was to get more information out there for the community & team working on the project. I’ve spent some time along with the contributors on github and via other means to make more information available to what the intent is and how people can contribute. So if you’re interested in helping with an entire domain space or merely a small element of the application, ping me and I’ll work with you to make it as easy as possible to contribute. With that, let’s jump into what’s what and what’s new. Cheers!
We Have a Build Server, More on This Soon, but for now…
I’ll have a post on how to setup Team City and quick tour of what is setup for the Junction Project. So stay tuned and I’ll have that and other news posted as it happens this coming week along with Team City & other tutorials related to the project itself. For a quick sneak peek feel free to take a look at the build server located at: http://teamcity.cascadiahacks.org/. Just login with “guest” and no password.
More Items Listed and Working on First Feature Commits and Comments For…
So every two weeks I intend to provide an update for the Junction Project. Who might have joined, what was worked on, where we are and generally any other bits of news related to the project. This is the first “Junction Two Weeks on Tuesday Review” so enjoy! 🙂
Clive Boulton @cliveb, Jared Wray @jaredwray, Kristen Mozian @kmozian and OJ Reeves @OJ joined the project to help out.
Issues, as stories and tasks were added to get started with the project. Here’s a first draft of the things we’re all working on. If you’d like to jump in, feel free to ping me and I’ll add you to the project, you can submit a PR (Pull Request) or talk to me about organizing a hackathon to help move the project forward.
Github Issues – Working Items
The easiest way to view these is to log into the Huboard Kanban Board and give a look see of what is in progress and who’s working on what. Currently I’ve outlined the big items that we’re working on and would love a fellow coder to jump in on. If you’re interested, ping me @adron or just jump into the issues list on Github (or view by milestone – i.e. functional area) and comment on the issue you want to dive into, I’ll add you so you can get started!
For the “Call the Doctor (Administration and Maintenance)” part of the application there are a number of questions to answer. How should we connect to Riak to ensure a secure SSH connection? Should we even use SSH? Is there another way to connect to the Riak Cluster for a secure way to administer the cluster?
In the “Golfing With Your Data (Query, Put, Deletes, Etc. Handling the CRUD)” one could dive into creating a functional query space to pull data out of a Riak Cluster. A lot of UI work needs to be done in this space, so if you’re up for putting together some awesome windows 8 interfaces, I’d love to hear from you!
Review Summary
At this point we’re moving forward. We’re always looking forward to new participants so reach out if you’re up for helping out! So until the next two weeks are up, see ya at the Junction!
Full context – Riak 1.3 RC came out just a couple dozen hours ago. RC stands for release candidate, which in turn basically means that version 1.3 is complete and any other additions will be for quick fixes or any issues that crop up. I’ve just started rolling a few new systems myself with this new version and hope you’ll join me in taking a hack at it. Let’s jump into a few reason why you’d want to leap into 1.3. You can read about the features below via the release notes also, but I’ve turned them into smaller bit size chunks below.
Giddyup in action!
The first thing with the latest v1.3 has been the massive effort put into testing via the riak_test and the giddyup repos. Ongoing there will be a much easier way to move forward in features & quality. This is one of the reasons I love working for Basho, the whole team isn’t about smoke and mirrors with testing, they readily and diligently work on testing. Which to add context, remember we’re talking about distributed systems here, which aren’t exactly the easiest thing to test. One doesn’t just merely walk in and write unit tests and assume a distributed systems is tested. This moves us forward, and those that want to contribute and get involved more heavily in Riak now have a platform to dive in confidently when using these testing repositories.
Active Anti-Entropy – Alright, now we’re getting to the features with bad ass sounding names. Also referred to as AAE, this feature grabs bad replica data and begins a correction through read repair to protect data. It’s one more layer of protection against any type of data loss, disaster, bit rot, etc).
MapReduce Sink Backpressure – This one reminds me of tuning when setting up forced induction, AKA a turbo on a car. But I digress, I’ve snagged a description from the release notes for this feature, “Riak Pipe brought inter-stage backpressure to Riak KV’s MapReduce system. However, prior to Riak 1.3, that backpressure did not extend to the sink. It was assumed that the Protocol Buffers or HTTP endpoint could handle the full output rate of the pipe. With Riak 1.3, backpressure has been extended to the sink so that those endpoint processes no longer become overwhelmed. This backpressure is tunable via a soft cap on the size of the sink’s buffer, and a period at which a worker should check that cap. These can be configured at the Riak console by setting application environment variables” ….suffice it to say this helps out with map reduce in certain situations.
Additional IPv6 Support – Riak Handoff and Protocol Buggers listen ala IPv6 now. Nuff’ said.
Luke removal – Luke is completely and utterly gone now. Dead. Don’t look for Luke here.
Riaknostic – This is now part of the default featureset instead of separate tooling.
SmartOS 1.8 Packages – They’re available.
Health Check – This is a pretty awesome system that’s been added. Basically it watches the system and enables and disables services based on conditions. It’s super easy, just flick the switch in the app.config.
[sourcecode language=”yml”]
{enable_health_checks, true}
[/sourcecode]
Reset Bucket Properties – A quickie definition from the release notes “The HTTP interface now supports resetting bucket properties to their default values. Bucket properties are stored in Riak’s ring structure that is gossiped around the cluster. Resetting bucket properties for buckets that are no longer used or that are using the default properties can reduce the amount of gossiped data.”
There were also a lot of PRs and more that you can check out on Github. These are the main key features that are now available and ready for use in 1.3. Check em’ out, feel free to contact me or any of the team to ask questions, let us know your 2 cents or otherwise banter about. Cheers! Sometime in the coming days I’ll have a quick start, akin to what’s in the docs, but with some specific ops on some IaaS Providers. So keep reading, coming up soon.
…and another update on Junction.
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