Hi, all, A few of us (Spencer, Saikat, Siming, Karthik, Josh, Sree) discussed today in our general slack channel that we should have spouts code somewhere so that people can reuse them (spouts are highly reusable in general) and contribute improvements. This is just a recap of the idea and some updates.
We have two options: 1. add a spouts/ dir in heron project. 2. create a new project in github. For option 1, it is easy to start. But the iteration and release will be coupled with Heron project itself. It is likely there will be quite some activities around spouts time by time when new spouts are added. Also, Heron itself is basically the engine itself plus APIs and tooling, while there could be quite some spouts in future with many new dependencies like Kafka, pubsub, neo4j and neptune, etc. It is debatable to have spout implementations in Heron project, and these extra dependencies could add some unnecessary complexity. For option 2, there will be some work up front. but it will be much easier to manage and evolve. And here will be less concerns about new spouts (in different languages) and dependencies because spouts are relatively independent to each other and we may generate artifacts per spout. Overall most people prefer option 2 for its cleanness. I talked with Twitter OSS team. They are happy to support the initiative and suggest us to check with Apache team and see what is the best process. First question is that should this new side project be under Apache or not? This might be a question to mentors. What do you think/suggest? Another topic being discussed is the build tool in case we decide to create a new side project. Maven is more mature for sure, but we will likely need multi language support so currently Bazel seems to be the winner (I personally vote for Bazel 1.0 because the backward compatibility has been bad so far). Any ideas or suggestions, please feel free to reply. Regards, --ning
