Healt of the project

Written the 17th May 2016 .

It has been a long time since the last blog post and several things changed. In good.

2 millions downloads

First, the project has reached the noticeable milestone of 2 millions downloads. We can attach different meaning to it but the most important one is the progression over the time.

Installations of Hoa's libraries through the time. The 2 millions downloads milestone has been reach. The curve has an exponential form.

The progression is exponential!

When making open source softwares, this is hardly difficult to know if people are using it or not. Even worse, to know who is using it. If nobody knocks on the IRC door to tell us its company, for instance, is using Hoa, we have no way to deduce it. The number of downloads provides a partial answer: We know that more and more people are using it due to the exponential growth of the downloads. We still do not know who is behind these downloads though. Please, tell us 😄!

For the fun, here is the graph of the Github activity:

Github stargazers of all Hoa's libraries repositories along with Github forks.

We are about to reach 1500 stargazers. Feel free to follow us!

Central

Since many months, we are working hard on stabilizing all the existing libraries over creating new ones. This decision has been taken during the Hoa Apex 2nd edition (the community event) and renewed during the 3rd edition. “Stabilizing” means migrating test suites, enhancing test suites, writing documentation etc. The goal is to have an even better quality and safety. Performances are also targeted.

Important releases

The Hoa\Graph library has been finalized and released under the 1.16.04.06 snapshot. The API is now stable and new iterators have been introduced. Thus, the classical DepthFirst and BreadthFirst iterators allow respectively to traverse a graph with a depth-first or breadth-first strategy. They come together with the BackwardDepthFirst and BackwardBreadthFirst iterators to traverse a graph backward.

The Hoa\Acl library has been finalized too and released under the 1.16.04.06 snapshot. The API is now stable. It is possible to have thinner queries on an ACL instance because it has always been based on the Hoa\Graph library but it now takes advantage of the new Hoa\Graph iterators to save CPU and memory, and thus to provide better performances. Thanks to the Assertable interface, it is possible to define very thin queries, and even to use the Hoa\Ruler library to define your own ACL rules! Take a look at the README.md file to get more information.

The Hoa\Socket library has been also finalized and released under the 1.16.01.15 snapshot but two major snapshots have been released since then, respectively 1.16.02.10 and 1.16.02.17. The API is now stable, the quality has been enhanced and the library is able to handle many more connections at the same time. The safety regarding socket disconnection errors is better in a high concurrency context (i.e. more than 500 concurrent connections). New TLS constants have been introduced too. Finally, a nice feature is the ability to define socket wrappers, like ws:// or irc:// , which let me transition to the next important release.

The Hoa\Websocket library has a new feature based on the socket wrapper. It is now possible to use ws:// and wss:// URLs, respectively for a non-secure and a secure connection, as a socket URL. Thus, to start a secure WebSocket connection over TLS, one might simply write:

$websocket = new Hoa\Websocket\Server( new Hoa\Socket\Server('wss://127.0.0.1:443') );

All the TLS configuration will be done automatically, which is pretty comfortable from the developer point of view.

Finally, the Hoa\Database library has received new patches to introduce iterators over result sets. It takes advantage of the database cursor to only load the needed data in the application, mainly saving memory. This is the result of almost 1 year of work (see Pull Request #18 on Github). The API is pretty straighforward and very comprehensive at the end: Given a result set, you define a direction ( FORWARD or BACKWARD ), an offset ( FROM_START or FROM_END ) and a fetching style ( AS_MAP , AS_SET , AS_OBJECT , AS_LAZY_OBJECT , AS_CLASS etc.) and an iterator is automatically built for you. A simple foreach loop will let you go through your database result. This is not stable yet for all the database drivers, but the API is stable and we are fixing bugs when they are found. Testing in progress. As you might foresee, this work has required several deep thinking on the Hoa\Iterator library API.

That's all for the important releases.

Quality, tests and numbers!

We said we are focused on the quality. Only for the new finalized libraries, here are the numbers:

Hoa\Graph : 9 new test suites, which represent 66 test cases, be 157 assertions,

: 9 new test suites, which represent 66 test cases, be 157 assertions, Hoa\Acl , 8 new test suites, which represent 82 test cases, be 369 assertions,

, 8 new test suites, which represent 82 test cases, be 369 assertions, Hoa\Socket , 10 new test suites, which represent 157 test cases, be 975 assertions.

Total: 27 new test suites, 305 new test cases, be 1501 new assertions, only for the new finalized libraries. Not bad!

A special note about Hoa\Socket test suites. We have been able to test advanced and complicated scenarios like unexpected disconnections, broken pipes, broadcast over not completely connected sockets (for instance if a handshake is required) etc. These extreme scenarios are where most of the bugs hide and this is crucial to be able to represent and reproduce them. This is especially possible thanks to atoum, the test framework under the Hoa\Test library.

Board and tasks

In January, we got more than 90 issues and PR opened in Hoa's libraries repositories. We decided to lower this number to 40 before May. We are in the middle of May and we have 41 issues and PR opened (see Hoa's central board). This is not bad at all! Considering we have constantly new issues and PR, we have closed more than 200 issues and PR in 5 months!

Communication

We are going to start a new blog series called “This Week in Hoa”. Every week we have between 5 and 20 issues and PR closed and it would be good to communicate about it. Stay tuned for the first episode!

Final word

As always, this work would have not been possible without the dedication of an active community. The project is discreet and does not make the “buzz”, but after more than 5 active years, it is still here and widely used like never before. More and more projects are using it and we hope to get back to you with huge news soon.

Thank you all!