Project Health

Cactus continues to progress as a project. We have been better about responding to communication tools in a timely manner as well. So Cactus has become healthier over time, even if not by leaps and bounds.

We are in active talks about cross-project collaboration with the aim of sharing at least some of the code among the different interoperability projects/labs that are out there, our stated goal is to have a compounding effect instead of fragmentation.
There's a comparison blog post underway as well as multiple different proof of concepts aimed at exploring how to achieve the above with Weaver and Firefly and also in general about being able to have runtime dependencies of the Cactus API server that were written in a different programming language but are possible to be compiled down to WebAssembly.

Required Information

Questions/Issues for the TSC

We don't have any issues or questions for the TSC at this time. We've said it before, but we'll say it again: as we roll out interfaces for different Hyperledger blockchains, though, we would appreciate reviews and comments from people affiliated with said blockchains. So please expect contact from us in the future!

Releases

We have recently released versions v0.4.0, v0.5.0 and a hot-fix to it as v0.4.1 (which was also a great test of our capability to rapidly issue releases when necessary). The changes in these releases are best described as moving towards a modular, efficient blockchain integration platform that can be used with both the Accenture and Fujitsu applications (as well as others). The precise changes in each release are much too long for this report, but thankfully Peter has done a wonderful job of documenting them here (https://github.com/hyperledger/cactus/releases). Please take a look if you'd like to see all of the release details.

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

We have made a concerted attempt to improve our response times and responses on communication tools. While some of our contributors have always been excellent (e.g. Peter), as a project, we thought we could do better, and have been making an effort which thus far seems to be working. Our response times and rates have definitely improved, but we would like to be even better.

The number of technical changes that we've made and the improvements we've completed are quite numerous and varied. We've worked on the modular architecture and infrastructure tools, in particular.

Current Plans

Our goal is to move forward with incremental releases targeting more and more features of our modular architecture.

As Cactus grows, we have realized the need to modularize our codebase more. We are currently in the process of implementing more "big project" infrastructure for Cactus, including sprint planning, a hierarchical repo structure, and more. This will let us more efficiently onboard contributors and make coding progress.

If you'd like to see a detailed list of things we're working on, please check out our github issues (https://github.com/hyperledger/cactus/issues). We have 100+ issues currently, so this is a very detailed list. But if you're curious (or want to add an issue of your own), please feel free to check it out.

Maintainer Diversity

We still have four maintainers. They are:

Shingo Fujimoto – Fujitsu

Jonathan Hamilton – Accenture

Peter Somogyvari – Accenture

Takuma Takeuchi – Fujitsu

We are more than open to adding additional maintainers outside of the core Accenture/Fujitsu group, and hopefully in the not too distant future.

Contributor Diversity

We recommend the following for detailed contributor information: https://lfanalytics.io/projects/hyperledger%2Fcactus/dashboard. Thanks Ry!

Our contributor list is starting to get too long to efficiently list in this report. We encourage you to check out the above link if you'd like to see all of the information. However, the organizations that lead contributors are still Accenture and Fujitsu. We would really like to get a new core contributor from outside of these organizations.

Additional Information

We don't really have anything new or exciting to report at this point. The maintainers and contributors are really looking forward to the pandemic being over so that we can meet in person sometime again. That's not particularly interesting, but that's all we've got.

2021 Q2 Hyperledger Cactus