State of the Art
Where we are and where we’re going:
Core Technology
- Our codebase is primarily Java.
- Core of our tech are the models, with multiple tools and platforms built on top.
- We don’t support a dedicated syntax for entities yet. We declare entities as Java interfaces, with classes being implemented automatically.
- Writing generic code for our entities is easy and the code is fast. Serializing to JSON takes ~25% less time than industry standard
jackson-databind, for example.
- Our entities are more flexible than other frameworks. We support multiple inheritance and cyclic references.
- Currently we only support development with
Eclipse with our plugins, and a custom build tool implemented on top of Gradle (and Ant which we’ll get rid of).
- Cortex is a modular monolith platform that’s been developed for years and there are a few commercial instances running live. It is powerful, yet bulky.
- Reflex, a modular microservices platform, is a recent initiative. A very lightweight core was written from scratch and lots of features can be directly migrated from Cortex. It already supports REST and RPC web endpoints, but can also be packaged as a command line tool.
- Our models are also supported in JavaScript/TypeScript for frontend development. We can also envision a pure Node.js implementation. Our modeled requests are a natural fit for asynchronous programming.
- We have a so-called “step-framework”, built for Gradle, which makes big chunks of our pipeline scripts portable.
Work in Progress
- Support popular tools like Gradle and IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA.
- Migrate more Cortex modules to Reflex to make it real world ready.
- Explain to people how consequent application of modeling leads to repeated patterns beneficial for both human and artificial intelligence.
Roadmap
- Codebase cleanup to make it easier for outsiders.
- Release in Maven Central.
- Pre-compile entities, rather than generate bytecode at runtime to improve startup time.
- Support native images on GraalVM..
- Improve JavaScript support, offer a more lightweight library that loads quickly.
- Support dedicated syntax for entities.