Longevity 0.27 - Stepping into Shapeless

After over 8 months since it's previous release, longevity version 0.27 is out! This release is very exciting to me, as it represents longevity's first steps into shapeless. I was able to incorporate shapeless.Generics into the domain model for all of the persistent objects, which will allow me to replace home-grown reflection based code with shapeless going forward.

The externally facing changes are minor. I've replaced a home-grown test data generation tool with ScalaCheck and scalacheck-shapeless. However, this minor change has already reaped benefits, as it replaces a particularly ugly part of the old longevity API - custom generation of test data - with a much more elegant process of supplying the right implicit org.scalacheck.Arbitrary.

This minor feature is really a proof of concept that I would be able to replace my homegrown reflective code with shapeless features. I feel confident that I can migrate the entire architecture over. Although of course, it will take some time. I will write more soon on how I plan to move forward from here. Stay tuned!

Summer Update

Hi there!

I'll be taking a month-long vacation starting this weekend (family road trip), and I wanted to drop a quick line before I head off, and give a status update on longevity.

First off, I made a video tutorial last week that's pretty nice. It's about 70 minutes, but it's probably a comfortable watch for most people at 1.5x speed.

I've been playing around with early steps in migrating to shapeless on a feature branch. The first bite I broke off for this is to rewrite my test data generation tools using Arbitrary from ScalaCheck. It's not finished yet, but I got through the most worrisome part, which was, how am I going to generate all the implicit stuff used by shapeless libraries? In this case, I need a bunch of implicits to generate an Arbitrary[P] using scalacheck-shapeless. The worrisome part is that I have to generate the class for a user-provided type P. This is problematic in general, because in order to get things like a Generic[P], you have to have the actual type P right there in your hands. Nothing else will do - not a TypeTag, nothing else along those lines. Thankfully, I already have macros that produce scaffolding around the type P, so I can generate the code to produce the Arbitrary[P], and it ends up getting inserted right there in the user code, where P is well known. I'm sure happy about that because it means the major worry I had about implementing things with shapeless is now solved.

So that's on a branch, and I put that aside because I decided I really need to start focusing in on providing users a schema migration tool. It's really the last "absolutely must have" feature for longevity, and while working on making longevity more functional is very enticing, I need to keep my priorities straight. The last two functionalization tasks - the ModelEv, PEv, and Key type classes, and the finally tagless, were both super important, but most importantly, user-facing changes. Most of the rest of the functionalization work I want to do is more internal, and shouldn't affect the user API too much. So I can definitely de-prioritize it. Only thing is, I want to support options in queries, and I've sort of been delaying that until after shapeless is in place. I could actually do it before then, but it just isn't the most efficient course, as I would have to rewrite most of it in shapeless.

So when I come back in September, I'll definitely be focusing on schema migration tool first. Once I have a rudimentary working tool out, I'll probably start splitting my time between that and migrating to shapeless.

Have a great August everybody!