Gathering feedback about cadence-ruby

[bjacobso]

Hello! I've played with the gem locally, and it works really well! Thank you to you and your team for making an awesome gem. Overall it was really easy to get up and running and having workflows and activities kicked off.

For us, we are currently building workflows and activities in golang and then RPCing to ruby, I think long term it would be nice for the team to do everything in ruby, but we are probably a few months from investigating that further for production. This will be a HUGE help towards that effort.

Some ergonomic feedback:

• it might be nice to have the proxy published as a docker image which you could then simply run from docker-compose with the rest of cadence?
• one of the use cases we have is child workflows which doesn't seem to be implemented yet and I haven't investigated to get a sense of what it would take to add

I will try to set some more time aside in the coming weeks to keep playing with it and get a higher fidelity example circulated internally.

Thank you!

On a similar note- we also investigated using states language to define workflows on top of cadence
but have found that defining in code is best, and the closer we can get to ruby for consistency the better: https://github.com/checkr/states-language-cadence

[antstorm]

@bjacobso thank you for the feedback! One specific use case that we are exploring is actually bridging the gap more between Golang and Ruby. You can easily have your Golang workflows call Ruby activities and vice versa allowing you to tap into existing projects/services without having to replicate calls over RPC.

Publishing a docker image for proxy makes a lot of sense and will simplify the setup, will put this on my TODO list, thank you for the suggestion!

Child workflows won't be difficult to implement as they are very similar to Activities. Right now I'm playing with asynchronous completion of activities and will add child workflows immediately after that.

I've seen the States Language project, great job! I think it makes sense for simpler workflows and maybe as a seamless transition from AWS StepFunctions over to Cadence, but as you've mentioned — it's probably better to use the code in the first place

[antstorm]

@bjacobso good news, we now have both Docker setup for the proxy (pretty minimal, but should be sufficient for most cases) as well as support for child workflows. There's also a docker-compose.yml for examples, which should simplify the process a bit