Devs - During ApacheCON, a few of the Fineract participants gathered in the usual "Birds of a Feather" - where people of like interests flock together - and one topic we took up was some general roadmapping for Fineract1.x
A key discussion was around componentization of Fineract1.x, and here is my attempt to bring this rich discussion back to the list. @Edward Cable <[email protected]> , @Victor Manuel Romero Rodriguez <[email protected]> , @Javier Borkenztain <[email protected]> Aleksandar had proposed, during his ApacheCON @home2021 talk that day, an effort to REVISE and RATIONALIZE the underlying components to be more "rational", "streamlined", "better at high volumes", which amounted to some fairly substantial restructuring of the existing components. This idea may help with the code debt that has crept into the code over the last 10 years. It would make the project more easily maintained. It may also allow fineract1.x to evolve into possibly a better behaving "microservice" (fineract1.x acting as a microservice itself) or (again maybe) a composition of microservices. In particular, the class structure around products and portfolio was highlighted as being highly complex to deal with. Currently, code changes in one area could have unanticipated impacts in other areas and test coverage is not sufficient to catch all of these issues. So, in summary, we admired the problem a bit, and agreed to start on some of the more manageable smaller changes, whilst still looking to a more intensive re-write. @Aleksandar Vidakovic <[email protected]> : are you able to put some high level Tickets in Jira for this? This will take some serious effort and needs to be scoped out. Secondly, this rewrite/revision of Fineract1.x was then compared to the FineractCN codebase strategy which began life as a rewrite of the Fineract structure from the ground up. Some devs are currently proposing PRs related to the core microservices (e.g. Identity) based on their experiences using the existing code base in production. The evolution of FineractCN into a full release will need some attention from the Community to make happen. The proposal for how to get to a release is still at ==> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Apache+Fineract+CN+Community+Roadmap . Let's start a separate thread on that. Thirdly, going back to Fineract1.x, one of the key issues is around the scalability and performance of the platform. A number of participants mentioned that fineract1.x is starting to be used in increasingly large-scale scenarios. As discussed on list previously, there are potential strategies, including replacing OpenJPA with EclipseLink ==> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FINERACT-849, (thank you @Yemdjih Kaze Nasser <[email protected]> ) and migrating to a Postgres option (whilst maintaining backwards compatibility?)... https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FINERACT-984. There was some interest in moving that forward. There were a lot of good discussions at Birds of a Feather and some fun moments. If we missed you this time, there's always next. Thank you. James
