Wendy - API improvements kick-off

[levibostian]

Well, here we go again. For some reason, making queues are fun for me to work on. I have built I think 4 different versions of them now, 🤣?

I have recently decided that I want to get back into Wendy development in my free time. This post is an announcement about the start of those changes coming. What changes to expect and how it may affect you if you use Wendy in your app.

Thank you!

Thanks to everyone who has given Wendy a try in their apps or glanced at the project on GitHub. I get so much joy when I see others try something that I made. Thank you!

Removing features

Time for a little house keeping. After rethinking some features that are built into Wendy, I have realized that some features are either promoting bad design patterns or not solving the problem in the best way.

The following features are going to be removed from Wendy:

• Manually running tasks - Update: removed in version 2.0
• Collections - Update: removed in version 3.0
• Error reporting - Update: removed in version 4.0

Removing these features is the best decision for Wendy in the long-term. It will help make Wendy faster to integrate and easier to learn and use. Also, by having a smaller amount of features, this will allow development to focus more attention on great functionality such as performance and documenting best practices to building offline-first apps. I find this functionality much more valuable than some features that were designed poorly.

Migration plan for removed features

This is how the release process will go for each of these feature removals:

• The feature will be deleted from the source code of the SDK. Not deprecated.
• A major version bump will occur, indicating the breaking change occurred.
• Documentation will be provided explaining how to migrate your code away from the feature that was removed, if and when you decide to install the major version change. Expect migration docs to lean more towards a best practice instead of suggesting a 3rd party SDK or alternative Wendy feature to swap to using. These features are being removed because they promote bad practices. So the migration path is to promote the better practices.

To try and make this process easier, each feature that is being removed will go through this process one-by-one instead of making 1 major version bump with lots of migrations that need to be completed.

API improvements

Besides removing some features, I am also planning on modifying the public API of some of the features of Wendy. These modifications will make Wendy easier to use and also reduce boilerplate code to use Wendy 🎊! (As you can tell, I think that Wendy is quite boilerplate heavy)

In this announcement, I only have 1 API improvement to share.

Delete the PendingTask protocol to reduce boilerplate code

Update: Done in version 5.0

Today, each type of data that you want to sync with your network API using Wendy, you have to write a lot of boilerplate code…

// You have to create a new class that inherits PendingTask protocol. 
class CreateGroceryListItemPendingTask: PendingTask {

    static let tag: Tag = String(describing: CreateGroceryListItemPendingTask.self)

    static let groceryStoreItemTextTooLongErrorId = "GROCERY_STORE_ITEM_TEXT_TOO_LONG"

    var taskId: Double?
    var dataId: String?
    var groupId: String?
    var manuallyRun: Bool = false
    var createdAt: Date?

    convenience init(groceryStoreItemId: Int) {
        self.init()
        self.dataId = String(groceryStoreItemId)
    }

    func isReadyToRun() -> Bool {
        return true
    }

    func runTask(complete: @escaping (Error?) -> Void) {

    }
}

// You also have to create a PendingTasksFactory to create instances of PendingTasks. 
class GroceryListPendingTasksFactory: PendingTasksFactory {

    func getTask(tag: PendingTask.Tag) -> PendingTask {
        switch tag {
        case CreateGroceryListItemPendingTask.tag: return CreateGroceryListItemPendingTask()
        default: 
            fatalError("Forgot case with tag: \(tag)")
        }
        }
    }
}

…that’s all code just to provide the Wendy SDK with some metadata. This code doesn’t have any sync logic in it 😅. From my experience using Wendy, this is quite painful. It has made Wendy not enjoyable to use at times.

To fix this problem, we will be deleting the PendingTask protocol entirely. No need to create subclasses for each of your tasks.

Here is a code snippet illustrating the idea for the change:

// Instead of having a PendingTask subclass, provide metadata when you add a task. 
Wendy.shared.addTask(tag: .createGroceryListItem, dataId: id)

// By use of a new runner class, you can have your logic for running the task. 
class MyWendyTaskRunner: WendyTaskRunner {

    func runTask(tag: String) async throws {
        switch tag {
        case .createGroceryListItem:
          // Perform API call.
      // 
          // If API call encounters a failure and the 
          //   Wendy task should be retried, throw an error.
        default: 
            fatalError("Forgot case with tag: \(tag)")
        }
    }
}

Note: This API is not finalized.

Whoa. That is way less code 🎊!

—

I am very excited to work on SDKs such as Wendy again. Brings back great memories I had while creating the first versions years ago. Well, I’m going to go write some code now.

Q: What about Wendy-Android?

A: As an iOS and Android developer, both SDKs are important to me. I am starting with iOS and hope to work on Android at some point in the future as well.

[levibostian]

Version 2.0 has been deployed which removes the manually run feature.

See the release notes which includes a link to the migration doc to migrate from v1 to v2.

[levibostian]

Version 3.0 has been deployed which removes the Collections feature.

See the release notes which includes a link to the migration doc to migrate from v2 to v3.

[levibostian]

Version 4.0 has been deployed which removes the error reporting feature.

See the release notes which includes a link to the migration doc to migrate from v3 to v4.

[levibostian]

After the latest update above, we are finished removing features as part of this announced change.

Next up, API improvements to existing features 🎊!

[levibostian]

v5 has been released which removes the PendingTask protocol. Drastically reducing the amount of boilerplate code in your app!

See release notes which includes a link to the migration doc from v4 to v5.

[levibostian]

Well. Now that I look at it, all of this announced work is complete! Wow, so exciting!

Time to plan for the next chunk of work to complete. Announcement to come.