First Week Ends

14 May 2018–21 May 2018

Time flies by so fast! It has been one whole week since the coding period has begun. I have been a doing a whole lot of reading up and understanding the code. As per our agreed upon schedule this week was devoted to designing an architecture for the language server and figure out all the tools that we should be using.

Development Updates

So, as I said, this week was all about get to know about the stuff I should know to work on the project efficiently. As part of it I had to come up with a project architecture, gather all the resources necessary. Here are some of the things we achieved this week.

1. Project Architecture: We have the project architecture designed now which we believe is extensible enough to support our future plans.
2. Project Repo: We now have a temporary repo to hold our project hosted on my github profile (coala-langserver). Once it matures we will merge it upstream.
3. Resources: I have now figured out all the tools we will be using. Some of them are listed in the next section.
4. More discussion about project: We have had more discussion about the project on the PR page of the update to projects.coala.io. My other mentor @gatesn also jumped in and gave some valuable review comments.

Things I learned this week

Coming up with a project architecture is not as easy as it sounds. You need to have a clear understanding of the goals, usability and the future scope of the project beforehand. Fortunately, my project was based on an existing project and I had some source of inspiration from the python-language server.
Here are some things I learned along the way this week:

1. A whole lot about CI: CI is awesome! To decide upon the infrastructure of our project I had to read how CI systems and how to configure some them. Fyi, we will be using Travis and AppVeyor.
2. Plugin ecosystem design: I was evaluating our need for a plugin based ecosystem for the server. Although the idea sounds like an overkill for this use case but I wanted to leave no stone unturned. As it turns out we won’t be using any. Try pluggy.
3. Python concurrent module: An awesome concurrency library that abstracts away all the nitty gritty details of parallel execution. (yes, parallel, I know it can do thread and process pools).
4. LSP: I had to read the specification again to make my understanding of project scope more clear and detailed.

The next week will be devoted to build a basic language server with primitive support for at least some request types. You can follow the project at the repo mentioned above.

First published on 23 May 2018