Hello Alexey
Thank you for your initiative and your suggestion!
I can only fully support the following statements in your email:
>Taking into account my Scala experience for the last 8 years, I
predict these wrappers will eventually be abandoned, unless such a Scala
library is a part of some bigger community like ASF.
>Also, non-official Scala API will lead people to play safe and choose
Java API only, even if they didn't want that at the beginning.
Second sentence is my current state.
From my point of view it would be very unfortunate if the Flink project
would lose the Scala API and thus the integration of concise, flexible
and future-oriented language constructs of the Scala language (and
further development of version 3).
Documentation of the API is essential. I would be interested to support
this efforts.
Best wishes
Günter
On 13.04.23 15:39, Alexey Novakov via user wrote:
Hello Flink PMCs and Flink Scala Users,
I would like to propose an idea to take the 3rd party Scala API
findify/flink-scala-api <https://github.com/findify/flink-scala-api>
project into the Apache Flink organization.
*Motivation *
The Scala-free Flink idea was finally implemented by the 1.15 release and
allowed Flink users to bring their own Scala version and use it via the
Flink Java API. See blog-post here: Scala Free in One Fifteen
<https://flink.apache.org/2022/02/22/scala-free-in-one-fifteen/>. Also,
existing Flink Scala API will be deprecated, because it is too hard to
upgrade it to Scala 2.13 or 3.
Taking into account my Scala experience for the last 8 years, I predict
these wrappers will eventually be abandoned, unless such a Scala library is
a part of some bigger community like ASF.
Also, non-official Scala API will lead people to play safe and choose Java
API only, even if they did want that at the beginning.
https://github.com/findify/flink-scala-api has already advanced and
implemented Scala support for 2.13 and 3 versions on top of Flink Java API.
As I know, FIndify does not want or does not have a capacity to maintain
this library. I propose to fork this great library and create a new Flink
project with its own version and build process (SBT, not Maven), which
would be similar to the StateFun or FlinkML projects.
*Proposal *
1. Create a fork of findify/flink-scala-api and host in Apache Flink Git
space (PMCs please advise).
2. I and Roman
<https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ViewProfile.jspa?name=rgrebennikov>
would
be willing to maintain this library in future for the next several years.
Further, we believe it will live on its own.
3. Flink Docs: PMCs, we need your guidelines here. One way I see is to
create new documentation in a similar way as StateFun docs. Alternatively,
we could just fix existing Flink Scala code examples to make sure they work
with the new wrapper. In any case, I see docs will be upgraded/fixed
gradually.
I hope you will find this idea interesting and worth going forward.
P.S. The irony here is that findify/flink-scala-api was also a fork of
Flink Scala-API some time ago, so we have a chance to close the loop :-)
Best regards.
Alexey
--
Günter Hipler
https://openbiblio.social/@vog61
https://twitter.com/vog61
