wasmCloud Community, 9 Feb 2022

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From YouTube: wasmCloud: Unit Testing Actors Demo, Union Support for Smithy Demo, Community Callout - 02/09/22

Description

wasmCloud is a platform for writing portable business logic that can run anywhere from the edge to the cloud, that boasts a secure-by-default, boilerplate-free developer experience with rapid feedback loop.

A

Welcome to wasm cloud wednesday for february the 9th 2022. uh we're going to start as usual with quick demo and we're going to hand off to nikki who's going to give us a quick readout of a quick change. We made to the washboard nikki go ahead. You have a permission to share.

B

Hi everybody uh thanks for this opportunity. It's really just a couple of very simple bug, fixes that were needed to be done. So hopefully everyone can see my screen. This is actually the uh the fixed screen.

B

So this is, after the fixes were in place. uh Basically, it was to simplify some of the copying of the actor and provider id so prior to this change. There was a button in between here. Hopefully, you guys can see my mouse between the copy actor id and the settings which was copy host id and the reason that was a little bit confusing was because a host id is down here and it didn't have the original few characters.

B

So before the bug fix people just saw two copy icons and they weren't sure you know what is what so. The change was primarily to do. Two things make the copy icon a little bit more explicit, so you could actually see some of the uh first few identifiers, uh so this wasn't there before- and this wasn't there before and to remove the host id, because the host id is already down here.

B

So I think the net effect of this change is that it's a lot more consistent between these various boxes between the actors, box, the provider box right and really the change is very simple: you put your your mouse over it. It says copy actor id that was there before copy provider id again that was there before and now you know, when you click on these buttons, they just simply work right. I won't copy it and show it to you, but you can take my word for it.

B

uh The other item, which was a small cleanup which was called by brooks- and you know, asked me to pick up as well uh this copy icon, even though it showed the first few characters of the id when you clicked on copy, and it said it copied it didn't actually copy. So again that was a very minor bug fix, but I think the net result of these changes is even though they're very simple changes, but I think it does help with the clarity of the dashboard and I think it's a little bit easier to use.

B

um That's really all I had unless someone has a question for me.

A

Well, that's awesome, nikki. um I really appreciate you taking the time to knock knock these out. That's absolutely phenomenal! There's no questions for nikki, we'll move on to our second demo uh brooks. I think you have a demo that was driven around some of the experience that matt's um and someone else had with a testing. I can't remember who, honestly uh out of slack.

C

Yeah, I think, there's slack handle maybe bgk or something like that, but in general just some feedback around um our our testing flow for for wasn't cloud in general. So I wanted to show you a little bit of an improvement that we have for actor development.

C

You know, actors are the main business logic that you're writing with wasn't cloud application, so certainly trying to make that as seamless as possible, and I want to show you an improvement we put in for unit testing actors.

C

So if you use- and you all should be able to see vs code, all fine and good I'll be doing some things in the terminal and some things in the actual window. But if you use wash to generate a new actor project, we open that up then rust analyzer is going to build. You know what what we saw before is you couldn't actually write unit tests for actors, so if you were to do and anybody who's written rust before this is going to look familiar.

C

But if you haven't, you can essentially set up a special place in your rust files. It can be at the bottom. It can be in a different file, it doesn't really matter, but just a special place that you can define tests, and this will only compile when you, you run cargo test and you can use it to assert certain functionality in your code, just a classic unit test.

C

So you know something you may see um across a couple. Projects is like a boilerplate test like this. Like it works, we create a variable x and sine of one. We assert that one equals one right, just making sure that you can run a test now previously when you're running this.

C

If you were to try to develop a wasn't, god actor and run this test. If you run cargo tests.

C

Could have compiled it beforehand, but I wanted to um wanted to see it we'll get an error saying you can't execute a binary file and the root cause of this is when you compile something for testing mode. Essentially you compile it, and then your computer tries to run the output binary to run the tests on it essentially and since it's a webassembly module, uh my computer arch mac doesn't know how to run a webassembly module. So there are various different ways of tackling this.

C

You can. You can have like a light shim. This is what was on bind gen does basically just like launches a small web assembly runtime to run your webassembly module inside of it. This is certainly something that we're considering and want to move towards in the future for doing like complex or more complex integration tests, but for unit tests we actually were able to make a change to uh the wasmbus macro to make it so that you can run unit tests in an actor file without doing a light shim without too much configuration.

C

So what we have now is, if you run cargo tests, uh is that what I did before yeah?

C

If you run cargo test, you can pass it the target triple of your host machine, which I think I don't know it's a apple bar one, and then this has to recompile, because it's compiling a dynamic library all that stuff, but we essentially compile this actor without any of the webassembly specific imports which make it so that normally, if you did this before this, would fail to compile on your machine because it doesn't know how to handle things like guest call or host call the things that we use to communicate between the host and the actor so um the down and dirty of it is we conditionally?

C

It's not dirty. We conditionally compile that stuff out if it's not on the webassembly target, so you can actually write tests, and this is a this is a simple example, but uh one of the example that I showed in the um in the documentation I'm about to publish this so that everybody can try. This out is we'd love to be able to um we'd love, to be able to assert things that our actor is doing right.

C

So we want to be able to write a test for this hello actor to make sure that we get the proper http response back. So if we write something like you know, we create our request, which is an http request object.

C

We want to get a response back from handling the http request, and then we want to assert things about that response. There's a little bit of modification that you have to do here. This is something you'll run into anytime you're doing unit tests, but specifically for rust doing uh async tests are a little bit more difficult. They require like a run time like tokyo.

C

So if we take this functionality that we have here in the actor handler and just put it in a synchronous function where we don't need to pass a self, we don't need to pass a context. We can test more the pure logic than like an integration test. So if we have a handle, http request function, which is takes in an http request and returns.

C

A standard result with an http response and an rpc error. This is the same function. Signature is above. We can actually just kind of take all of this logic out and put it into this function and instead call uh the http or this this handler.

C

So all I'm doing is taking all of that out and putting it in a synchronous function, which is a little more logic based it's taking the request, turning into a response not dealing with anything else, but what we can do now is we can actually test that this function is doing what we want it to. So if we write out a full, a full unit test with the requests, we can unwrap that because it's a test and that's fine, we can assert things like that.

C

The response status code is 200, that this is an actual, successful http request. We can assert things like the response. Dot body is what we expect it to be, and if we think about this I don't know if you, you all, have seen this um if you've seen this example or not before, but what this hello actor is doing. Is it's essentially saying hello and then, whatever you give is a name in the http request. We say hello to that name.

C

So if we craft our http request here, we can do a get request.

C

The path can just be slash. That's not really, then really factor into it. The query string we give name equals. I don't know awesome community.

C

Header we can just do an empty hash map and the body we also don't care about. This is a simple unit test, making sure that we're getting back the correct body. So we can assert that the response is hello, awesome, community and the response body is a vector of bytes, so we can just turn that into a string instead.

C

So we've got our simple unit test can handle http request. We constructed our full object, we're calling the function that we're trying to assert and we make sure that it's a successful response and we have the body that we expect. Now we can run this. uh We can actually run this test directly from the s code. We click run test check it out. We get an okay and I'm not I'm not faking anything. If we fail this test, assert equals two or whatever we get a stack trace.

C

We actually are you know doing these unit tests um don't mean to project the the trust issues just wanna show. This is a real, uh real demo that we're doing and there's the the only other thing that I've done here in order to run the the unit test in vs code. uh Is I just updated my my rust analyzer when you run a test, it passes the native target, so the the tl dr here is running unit tests is now possible. In wasn't cloud actors, it's fairly simple doesn't need much modification.

C

You just need to tell cargo to run the test on your machine's target, but in general this is. This is a big step forward, because there wasn't really a way to run any kind of cargo test on an actor or on a webassembly module without having that shim, and that adds in complexity. You may need to download wasm time or with lawson bind gin. You need node.js, or things like that.

C

So, like I mentioned, this is all ready to go. When you generate a new project now uh you should be able to as long as you have waz and bus rpc, 0.7 or later you should have access to being able to do this and we'll have a new section in our documentation coming out, probably a little later today or a little bit a little bit later this week on. Writing these tests. So uh looking forward to see if this helps solve some of the pain points of just writing. Some simple stateless functionality, tests.

A

Brookshire demo is awesome. Man.

A

Was that, like bantamweight.

A

uh Any questions for brooks, I think getting that example checked in, uh would be awesome and uh making sure we get that um uh making sure we get the documentation out. There would be great. I know that this was a real pain point, and I think my favorite thing is is that you know internally, we didn't even have to like spike to say uh tuscan raider. Thank you taylor. uh uh I guess they ride. Banthus uh we didn't even have to spike, like the team.

A

Just kind of like saw the pain that um that mats and vic were vg were having and um or vic were, having and just kind of swarm to it to fix it, and I just love that sort of like care for everybody across the community and for the folks that are building it.

A

I think max has some awesome pull requests in flight uh that I don't want to spoil, because I know we have even more demos today, uh steve, I think you and bailey have been talking about um a great one for the sql um provider. um Do you want to do a quick preview of what you guys have been working on.

D

Yes, yes, I will um I'll first give I wanted to give a shout out to to matt sparsen. He did submit a pr for blob store uh interface and um that's we had before the migration to the 0.50 wasn't cloud host.

D

We had a blob store capability provider interface and there was a file system provider and an amazon s3 provider that used that interface and um so matt responded to the help, wanted tag on on the repo and has picked it up and carried the ball and so that the file system provider is in progress and there's also an s3 provider in progress they're both using the interface so uh within the next uh few days that the interfaith pr should be merged and uh we should have a couple more providers soon.

D

So that's awesome and thanks uh thanks to matt for for that work, um and I wanted to talk about uh unions in smithy interfaces. So by the way, there's a um there's. A recent video I'm going to paste the link into the zoom chat here uh that amazon posted about why they created smithy and it's kind of a neat um overview of the history. Why they why they built it and what goals it solves they they use. Smithy idl for describing interfaces for something like 270 services um is, is pretty powerful.

D

We've only used a subset of the smithy capability, and one of the things that we didn't have support for is unions, and we have some experimental support for that now. So I'm going to share.

D

A window with my ide right now this is checked in as a pr and there's some notes. There's some notes in the readme to say this is experimental, but um we. What we can do now is declare a union um if you're a rest developer, it's more like an enum, but you can.

D

You can have an object that can have more than one data type and we've we've had some work arounds for this in our interfaces already, for example, in the key value store, there's a return code that has a boolean flag for whether or not the result is successful and then an optional error string.

D

So this is the kind of thing that could be consolidated into a union, but one of the big motivating cases is uh the sql interface, where uh we want to be able to do um prepared statements and uh be able to pass a bunch of parameters in with a prepared statement, and that's been kind of hard to do, and we're now going to be able to do that.

D

uh So here's that here's some examples in this smithy file, so I'm not going to type a demo, because I can't type and talk at the same time like brooks, can so I'm going to show you show you the files.

D

So here's an example of a response you could do uh is either returning data or an error, and the union can have any data type.

D

It could be a structure or any of an array, any kind of value, um here's another another kind of thing you could do is is something that's analogous to a json value where it could have any type, and this is again just a demo, but here's a value that could take any of these data types uh all the way down to a float or a blob and over here on the right.

D

If you can see that see the screen um it when the code generator processes this, it creates this enum in rust. It gives one of those values uh so right now the union support is uh I I called it a demo release uh we'd like to get some feedback on it. The way we do code generation could change a little bit.

D

um So I wrote I wrote in there that over the next uh 45 days- or so we'll probably experiment with this- so don't use it for production code, but we would definitely love some feedback on it and hear about how you might want to use it. And if it's useful to you.

D

D

All right, that's unions,.

A

All right well, that is super exciting. I I'm really excited about the more advanced capabilities steve and I thought your demo was awesome too. You know there's lots of room for people to demo in different ways. We had already three demos today, which I think is incredible. uh Are there any other demos uh uh on the call today or anything people want to share that they're working on.

A

um I would just call out uh as a fun demo if, if people did not see it in slack, I would encourage you to check out. There was a somebody that did a drive by on our slack and dropped. A new video game they've been experimenting with to the 2048 game. uh It was just really neat to have.

A

You know another, it's always fun when community members show up with uh stuff that, like you know, it's like that, are as excited about wasm cloud as we are, which is um which is awesome, and I hope uh matt uh to your point. I hope that he open sources that uh as well- and um you know like uh just continues to develop and you know plug some features in because it is cool to see people building a lot of fun stuff in a wasm cloud.

A

um I think we've got a few other topics to bring up today, but before we do, I kind of want to turn to two community topics. The first topic is uh that submissions are still open across the board for kubecon eu.

A

A couple folks from the cosmonautic and wasn't cloud team will for sure be there right now I'll be attending a tuesday through friday, and I believe that brooks and taylor are also going to be in town manning the booth and helping out for wasm day. We still need volunteers if you're interested in volunteering and even more, we need talks about any cloud native, related webassembly talk, whether it's wasm cloud or not. So please feel free to get your submissions in.

A

I would also hopefully um mention that there are a few other related days that you may want to submit to as well kubernetes on edge uh kubernetes security day uh and there's a kubernetes telco day as well. um So if you need any collaboration or coordination, if there's uh jeff you- and I met late last week about maybe some of the things that we would collab on in the community, you know if there's any opportunities to to bring things out.

A

Please get your talk submitted if you'd, like some feedback before you submit your talk, just reach out, we've been able to push the webassembly day back to february 28th for our submissions and then, as a committee, we're going to hustle to get responses back um asap to get people notified by early march for attendance. I know that folks have been booking flights and flights are super cheap right now um for anybody that is planning on going.

A

I uh helped uh I was working with a team earlier this week and they booked their flights for like 400 bucks, which was pretty amazing, they're flying into barcelona and taking the train, but I hope to see as many people there safety permitting as possible and then I wanted to quick um hand the mic over to you stuart. If you don't mind, if you want to do a plug, I know you've got your event, that's in flight, and uh you can let us all know. What's going on.

E

Thank you liam um yeah uh march, 2nd um evening, london time. um So I guess that's 6 30 our time it'll be 1 30 your time right, yeah um we're having a hybrid event. um We love webassembly outside the browser.

E

um We've got um a speaker from single store in the uk, um talking about using webassembly to bring process processing closer to the data. um Extending the database, basically with webassembly, which is great and um brooks, and taylor um are very kindly offered to do a talk.

E

We've just been talking about it just before this meeting um about um web assembly, so while some cloud as as a step up from kubernetes or the journey from kubernetes to um to wasn't cloud and the wider context of um web assembly in that in the cloud-native distributed application space. So that's really really exciting. um We, um we may have some other speakers as well, but they're not confirmed yet so um invites will be going out this week and all the details will be posted up and I'll. Let you know where the urls are.

A

All right: uh well, whenever you get the self sign up, uh stuart feel free to spam, our slack and get it to channel and um we'll tweet it out from our account and all the things and um I'm really looking forward to the talks um as well. That's um it's still march 2nd! Is that right.

E

March, the second year, which is wednesday um at almost exactly this time, so whatever time it is in your time zone now that is the time it will be well.

A

We're all going to transition right from wasm cloud wednesday to uh to your event, and that will be the first wasn't called wednesday that I'm going to miss. I think I'm going to be on an airplane at times, so on the.

E

Way to barbados or something are you going.

A

I go to the dr uh kind of uh my niece is getting married and my kids are going to play their violence on the beach so and I'm going to drink a whole bunch of pina coladas. But that's for another call, uh great any other social or community news that anybody wants to mention any other events in flight.

A

Great and then we can turn to open floor or topics.

C

um I've got a, I do, have a community call out today, um so I can go ahead and do that so uh community call out this week. It includes one. uh It's just one issue, one thing that we kind of talked about last week, um but us it wasn't cloud we're constantly trying to improve our documentation and especially the new troubleshooting guide that went out and the new testing guide that just went out. I merged that in right after the demo, so everybody can go play with it.

C

You know we're really curious if you have gone through any uh any development issues, while you've been working on wasmcloud. If there's just an error that you saw on the host logs, that you didn't exactly know how to track that down and find out what that meant. You know there are things that, since we've been working on wasn't cloud for so long, we know where to look for certain errors and for somebody who's coming and new to developing actors and providers on wasmcloud.

C

We want to have an easy way for people to be able to search those errors on our documentation, and so I know that this is a little bit of a tough call out, because it's kind of asking people to go back in their brains and figure out like remember if they had anything but just a general call. If you, if you try out the actor testing framework, if you um are playing with unions or if you I know mats and a couple, other people in the community are starting to write their own capability providers.

C

If you're running into anything love to hear about it here, I'll probably keep this open I'll, probably mention it again next week and then close it a little bit later. I want to time boxes so that this issue doesn't just live forever, but we'd love to have any additional feedback that you have. So this is kind of just an open call for anybody in the community to give us some feedback or drop some errors that you've seen we're confused about.

C

Perfect, I see stewart said that he's got one that he wants to drop in here. That'll be great.

E

I think, but it was um yeah I'll describe it in the issue. Perfect.

A

Already knocking it out wonderful, any uh any other additional topics that we'd want to explore or discuss. uh Next.

A

Okay, super well, I think that may be it for wasn't cloud wednesday. I think a super productive meeting today and a lot of awesome momentum, for um you know things in the ecosystem. In the community. We have a ton of new capability providers coming online, as people have really started to. um You know continue to build out some cool things and I'm super excited I'll, go and stop the recording here. As usual. uh I hope everybody has a wonderful week have a great day.

A