January 2014 status

+ 07 + Jan +

+ +

I will now be regularly writing posts about project status, plans +and hopes for the future.

Before that though, there’s one important news to share.

Until a year ago all development was financed through consulting +and development services. This worked alright but too much time was +spent doing things that didn’t benefit the open source projects. +And that didn’t make me happy at all. Because I like being happy +I stopped that for the most part and spent the year figuring things +out, experimenting and discussing with people about it.

What makes me happy is answering these "what if" questions. +Ranch and Cowboy are a direct product of that, as they originate +from the "what if we could have a server running different protocols +on different ports but all part of the same application?"; Erlang.mk +is a bit different: "this works great for me, what if it could +become the standard solution for building Erlang applications?".

When I successfully answer the question, this becomes a project +that may end up largely benefiting the Erlang community. I love +Erlang and I love enabling people to build awesome products based +on my projects. It’s a lot more rewarding than activities like +consulting where you only help one company at a time. And it’s +also a much better use of my time as this has a bigger impact on +the community.

The hard part is to figure out how to be able to spend 100% +of the time on projects that you basically give away for free, +and still be able to afford living.

The immediate solution was getting work sponsored by the +LeoFS project. LeoFS is a great +distributed file storage that I can only recommend to anyone who +needs to store files or large pieces of data. The sponsorship +works pretty great, and spurred development of the SPDY code in +Cowboy amongst other things, plus a couple upcoming projects +done more recently and getting a final touch before release.

It turns out sponsoring works great. So I’m thinking of +expanding on it and hopefully get enough sponsoring for fulltime +open source development. So I figured out a few things that +can give incentive to companies willing to sponsor.

Sponsors can request that a particular version of Cowboy +be maintained indefinitely (as long as they’re sponsoring). +This means fixes will be backported. This doesn’t include +features although I can take requests depending on feasability.

Sponsors can have a direct, private line of communication, +useful when they need help debugging or optimizing their product.

Sponsors can get their name associated with one of the +project and get a good standing in the community thanks +to this. They would be featured in the README of the project +which is viewed by hundreds of developers daily.

Sponsors can be listed on this website. I will modify +the front page when we get a few more sponsors, they will be +featured below the carousel of projects.

Please contact us if +you are interested in sponsoring, and say how much you are willing +to sponsor. The goal here is only to have enough money to make a +living and attend a few conferences. There’s an upper limit in the +amount needed per year, so the more sponsors there are the cheaper +it becomes to everyone.

The upper limit stems from the new legal entity that will replace +the current Nine Nines. This is mostly to lower the legal costs and +simplify the administrative stuff and allow me to dedicate all my +time on what’s important. From your point of view it’s business as +usual.

Now on to project statuses and future works.

Cowboy

Cowboy is getting ready for a 1.0 release. Once multipart support +is in, all that’s left is finishing the guide, improving tests and +finishing moving code to the cowlib project. I hope everything will +be ready around the time R17B is released.

I already dream of some API breaking changes after 1.0, which +would essentially become 2.0 when they’re done. An extensive survey +will be setup after the 1.0 release to get more information on what +people like and don’t like about the API.

And of course, when clients start implementing HTTP/2.0 then we +will too.

Ranch

Ranch is also getting close to 1.0. I am currently writing a +test suite for upgrades. After that I also would like to write +a chaos_monkey test suite and add a getting started chapter to the +guide.

Ranch is pretty solid otherwise, it’s hard to foresee new +features at this point.

Erlang.mk

I didn’t expect this project to become popular. Glad it did though.

Windows support is planned, but will require GNU Make 4. +Thankfully, it’s available at least through cygwin. Make, +Git and Erlang will be the only required dependencies +because the rest of the external calls will be converted to +using Guile, a Scheme included since GNU Make 4. So it is +Guile that will download the needed files, magically fill +the list of modules in the .app file and so on, allowing +us to provide a truly cross-platform solution without +losing on the performance we benefit from using Make.

Also note that it is possible to check whether Guile +is available so we will be able to fallback to the current +code for older systems.

I am also thinking about adding an extra column to the package +index, indicating the preferred tag or commit number to be used. +This would allow us to skip the individual dep lines +entirely if the information in the package index is good enough. +And committing that file to your project would be the only thing +needed to lock the dependencies. Of course if a dep +line is specified this would instead override the file.

Alien Shaman

This is the two-parts project requested by the LeoFS team. +This is essentially a "distributed bigwig". I am hoping to +have a prototype up in a few days.

Alien is the part that allows writing and enabling probes +in your nodes. Probes send events which may get filtered before +being forwarded to their destination. The events may be sent +to a local process, a remote process, over UDP, TCP or SSL. +Events may also be received by a process called a relay, which +may be used to group or aggregate data before it is being sent +over the network, reducing the footprint overall.

Shaman is the UI for it. It will ultimately be able to display +any event as long as it’s configured to do so. Events may be logs, +numeric values displayed on graphs updated in real time, lists of +items like processes and so on.

Feedback

That’s it for today! There will be another status update once +Shaman is out. But for now I have to focus on it.

As always, please send feedback on the projects, this post, +the sponsoring idea, anything really! Thanks.

+ +

99s

January 2014 status

Cowboy

Ranch

Erlang.mk

Alien Shaman

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