Quill and different options for contexts - scala

using Quill+Scala in one project I am working with, but I find Quill's scala documentation very poor.
In their website, there are basically three context types for interacting with Cassandra: CassandraSynchContext, CassandraAsynchContext, and CassandraStreamContext. While names are suggestive, I need all the information I can get. E.g., what does stream mean here? What are the properties in async calls, how to get exceptions, etc.
So, in a sense, I am interested in any reliable documentation pointing out the key differences between all three contexts. Any help is useful at this point.
Thanks.

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Best practice to map OrientDB ORecordId onto RestFull friendly ID representation

We are looking into OrientDB as our persistency solution behind a restful web service, because a GraphDB would be a perfect match for our use case. One of the things we have noticed is that entities (both Vertex and Edges) are uniquely identified by a ORecordId, containing the '#${clusterId}:${clusterPosition}'. In a restful API, based on my personal experience from relational DB's, you typically have several solutions to identify entities uniquely, for example:
UUID's, generated in code and persisted on DB level
Long/Int values, generated on DB level incrementally
etc...
The problem is that the format "#${clusterId}:${clusterPosition}" is not really URL/REST friendly (example: .../api/user/[#${clusterId}:${clusterPosition}]/address). Do you have any advice/experience on how you would deal with this, keeping in mind that you need a bi-directional mapping between the ORecordId and the "RestFulFriendlyId"?
Any hints and best practices based on experience would be truly appreciated....
Best regards,
Bart
We're looking into using HashID. http://hashids.org/
There are some minor concerns we have still, but theoretically, HashID should get you a hashed Rid, which is also convertible, so it won't take up more storage space (like with a UUID). It will just take a small bit of CPU time.
Please note, this little tool is not in any way a true hash, as in, it makes it very hard to crack the hash. It is more about good obfuscation. If you are at all worried about the Rids being known, this isn't a proper solution.
Scott
Actually, I'd say the RIDs are very RESTful, if you do this:
.../domain.com/other-segments/{cluster}/{position}/...
Since clusters are a "superset" of a specific class (i.e. one class will have one or more clusters), this can be thought of as identifying the target data object by type/record. I'm not sure what backend you're using, but extracting those two URL segments and recombining them to #x:y should be a fairly simple (and maybe mostly automatic) task.

EventStore basics - what's the difference between Event Meta Data/MetaData and Event Data?

I'm very much at the beginning of using / understanding EventStore or get-event-store as it may be known here.
I've consumed the documentation regarding clients, projections and subscriptions and feel ready to start using on some internal projects.
One thing I can't quite get past - is there a guide / set of recommendations to describe the difference between event metadata and data ? I'm aware of the notional differences; Event data is 'Core' to the domain, Meta data for describing, but it is becoming quite philisophical.
I wonder if there are hard rules regarding implementation (querying etc).
Any guidance at all gratefully received!
Shamelessly copying (and paraphrasing) parts from Szymon Kulec's blog post "Enriching your events with important metadata" (emphases mine):
But what information can be useful to store in the metadata, which info is worth to store despite the fact that it was not captured in
the creation of the model?
1. Audit data
who? – simply store the user id of the action invoker
when? – the timestamp of the action and the event(s)
why? – the serialized intent/action of the actor
2. Event versioning
The event sourcing deals with the effect of the actions. An action
executed on a state results in an action according to the current
implementation. Wait. The current implementation? Yes, the
implementation of your aggregate can change and it will either because
of bug fixing or introducing new features. Wouldn’t it be nice if
the version, like a commit id (SHA1 for gitters) or a semantic version
could be stored with the event as well? Imagine that you published a
broken version and your business sold 100 tickets before fixing a bug.
It’d be nice to be able which events were created on the basis of the
broken implementation. Having this knowledge you can easily compensate
transactions performed by the broken implementation.
3. Document implementation details
It’s quite common to introduce canary releases, feature toggling and
A/B tests for users. With automated deployment and small code
enhancement all of the mentioned approaches are feasible to have on a
project board. If you consider the toggles or different implementation
coexisting in the very same moment, storing the version only may be
not enough. How about adding information which features were applied
for the action? Just create a simple set of features enabled, or map
feature-status and add it to the event as well. Having this and the
command, it’s easy to repeat the process. Additionally, it’s easy to
result in your A/B experiments. Just run the scan for events with A
enabled and another for the B ones.
4. Optimized combination of 2. and 3.
If you think that this is too much, create a lookup for sets of
versions x features. It’s not that big and is repeatable across many
users, hence you can easily optimize storing the set elsewhere, under
a reference key. You can serialize this map and calculate SHA1, put
the values in a map (a table will do as well) and use identifiers to
put them in the event. There’s plenty of options to shift the load
either to the query (lookups) or to the storage (store everything as
named metadata).
Summing up
If you create an event sourced architecture, consider adding the
temporal dimension (version) and a bit of configuration to the
metadata. Once you have it, it’s much easier to reason about the
sources of your events and introduce tooling like compensation.
There’s no such thing like too much data, is there?
I will share my experiences with you which may help. I have been playing with akka-persistence, akka-persistence-eventstore and eventstore. akka-persistence stores it's event wrapper, a PersistentRepr, in binary format. I wanted this data in JSON so that I could:
use projections
make these events easily available to any other technologies
You can implement your own serialization for akka-persistence-eventstore to do this, but it still ended up just storing the wrapper which had my event embedded in a payload attribute. The other attributes were all akka-persistence specific. The author of akka-persistence-eventstore gave me some good advice, get the serializer to store the payload as the Data, and the rest as MetaData. That way my event is now just the business data, and the metadata aids the technology that put it there in the first place. My projections now don't need to parse out the metadata to get at the payload.

In what scenarios would I need to use the CREATEREF, DEREF and REF keywords?

This question is about why I would use the above keywords. I've found plenty of MSDN pages that explain how. I'm looking for the why.
What query would I be trying to write that means I need them? I ask because the examples I have found appear to be achievable in other ways...
To try and figure it out myself, I created a very simple entity model using the Employee and EmployeePayHistory tables from the AdventureWorks database.
One example I saw online demonstrated something similar to the following Entity SQL:
SELECT VALUE
DEREF(CREATEREF(AdventureWorksEntities3.Employee, row(h.EmployeeID))).HireDate
FROM
AdventureWorksEntities3.EmployeePayHistory as h
This seems to pull back the HireDate without having to specify a join?
Why is this better than the SQL below (that appears to do exactly the same thing)?
SELECT VALUE
h.Employee.HireDate
FROM
AdventureWorksEntities3.EmployeePayHistory as h
Looking at the above two statements, I can't work out what extra the CREATEREF, DEREF bit is adding since I appear to be able to get at what I want without them.
I'm assuming I have just not found the scenarios that demostrate the purpose. I'm assuming there are scenarios where using these keywords is either simpler or is the only way to accomplish the required result.
What I can't find is the scenarios....
Can anyone fill in the gap? I don't need entire sets of SQL. I just need a starting point to play with i.e. a brief description of a scenario or two... I can expand on that myself.
Look at this post
One of the benefits of references is that it can be thought as a ‘lightweight’ entity in which we don’t need to spend resources in creating and maintaining the full entity state/values until it is really necessary. Once you have a ref to an entity, you can dereference it by using DEREF expression or by just invoking a property of the entity
TL;DR - REF/DEREF are similar to C++ pointers. It they are references to persisted entities (not entities which have not be saved to a data source).
Why would you use such a thing?: A reference to an entity uses less memory than having the DEFEF'ed (or expanded; or filled; or instantiated) entity. This may come in handy if you have a bunch of records that have image information and image data (4GB Files stored in the database). If you didn't use a REF, and you pulled back 10 of these entities just to get the image meta-data, then you'd quickly fill up your memory.
I know, I know. It'd be easier just to pull back the metadata in your query, but then you lose the point of what REF is good for :-D

Should ErrorCollector (which is part of JSR-303 functionality) in GWT 2.4 be redesigned?

I know this question is not about particular problem I have. It's rather question to GWT SDK team. As far as I remember StackOverflow is now their official communication channel with engineering community :)
Problem:
For aliased editors such as ValueBoxEditorDecorator you'll receive duplicate errors in your HasEditorErrors.showErrors() - one for ValueBoxEditorDecorator itself and another one for nested ValueBoxEditor. Current implementation of ValueBoxEditorDecorator iterates through list of errors and rejects ones that don't belong to nested editor. It looks like a hacky workaround to me :)
Question:
I think duplicates should be discarded somewhere earlier, for example in SimpleViolation.pushViolations or DelegateMap.of or ErrorCollector.endVisit.
Initially I thought why not just keep one delegate per unique EditorContext.getAbsolutePath and drop the rest. Then I realized that perhaps there is a use-case when ValueBoxEditorDecorator and its inner ValueBoxEditor would get different errors although I can't come up with the scenario how it can happen due to my short-time knowledge of gwt's sources.
So here is what I think. Why don't we use map in ErrorCollector.errorStack instead of List where the key will be combination of EditorError.getAbsolutePath() and EditorError.getUserData() ? It would solve two issues IMO:
We won't need to filter out dupkicate errors in our editors.
ErrorCollector.visit() won't assume that editors like this one are traversed in hierarchical order. I don't see anywhere in documentation that visitors would always work that way.
What do you think ?

REST best practice for getting a subset list

I read the article at REST - complex applications and it answers some of my questions, but not all.
I am designing my first REST application and need to return "subset" lists to GET requests. Which of the following is more "RESTful"?
/patients;listType=appointments;date=2010-02-22;user_id=1234
or
/patients/appointments-list;date=2010-02-22;user_id=1234
or even
/appointments/2010-02-22/patients;user_id=1234
There will be about a dozen different lists that I need to return. In some of these, there will be several filtering parameters and I don't want to have big 'if' statements in my server code to select the subsets based on which parameters are present. For example, I might need all patients for a specific doctor where the covering doctor is another and the primary doctor is yet another. I could select with
/patients;rounds=true;specific_id=xxxx;covering_id=yyyy;primary_id=zzzz
but that would require complicated branching logic to get the right list, where asking for a specific subset (rounds-list) will achieve that same thing.
Note that I need to use matrix parameters instead of query parameters because I need to do filtering at several levels of the URL. The framework I am using (RestEasy), fully supports matrix parameters.
Ralph,
the particular URI patterns are orthogonal to the question how RESTful your application will be.
What matters with regard to RESTfulness is that the client discovers how to construct the URIs at runtime. This can be achieved either with forms or URI templates. Both hypermedia controls tell the client what parameters can be used and where to put them in the URI.
For this to work RESTfully, client and server must know the possible parameters at design time. This is usually achieved by making them part of the specification of the link relationship.
You might for example define a 'my-subset' link relation to have the meaning of linking to subsets of collections and with it you would define the following parameters:
listType, date, userID.
In a link template that spec could be used as
<link rel="my-subset' template="/{listType}/{date}/patients;user_id={userID}"/>
Note how the actual parameter name in the URI is decoupled from the specified parameter name. The value for userID is late-bound to the URI parameter user_id.
This makes it possible for the URI parameter name to change without affecting the client.
You can look at OpenSearch description documents (http://www.opensearch.org) to see how this is done in practice.
Actually, you should be able to leverage OpenSearch quite a bit for your use case. Especially the ability to predefine queries would allow you to describe particular subsets in your 'forms'.
But see for yourself and then ask back again :-)
Jan
I would recommend that you use this URL structure:
/appointments;user_id=1234;date=2010-02-22
Why? I chose /appointments because it is simple and clear. (If you have more than one kind of appointment, let me know in the comments and I can adjust my answer.) I chose the semicolons because they don't imply hierarchy between user_id and date.
One more thing, there is no reason why you should limit yourself to just one URL. It is just fine to have multiple URL structures that refer to the same resource. So you might also use:
/users/1234/appointments;date=2010-02-22
To return a similar result.
That said, I would not recommend using /dates/2010-02-22/appointments;user_id=1234. Why? I don't think, in practice, that /dates refers to a resource. Date is an attribute of an appointment but is not a noun on its own (i.e. it is not a first-class kind of thing).
I can relate to what David James answered.
The format of your URIs can be like he suggested:
/appointments;user_id=1234;date=2010-02-22
and / or
/users/1234/appointments;date=2010-02-22
while still maintaining the discoverability (at runtime) of your resource's URIs (like Jan Algermissen suggested).