2021 Q3 Hyperledger Cactus

Created by Hart Montgomery, last modified by Gari Singh on Oct 16, 2021

Project Health

Cactus continues to be a relatively healthy project. We have added a number of new contributors this quarter, although many of them are from Accenture (which was already our largest contributor base). We continue to grow, and are also collaborating with the Yui and Weaver projects to see what common ground we have.

Required Information

Questions/Issues for the TSC

(Hart: I don’t have any issues. If you have any, please feel free to add them.)

Releases

We had one main release this quarter, which followed an alpha release (and has since been followed by a hotfix):

05/06: 0.5.0 alpha release.

05/19: 0.5.0 release.

Our 0.5.0 release advanced our capabilities and improved Cactus in a number of different areas. Rather than spell it all out here, we encourage you to look at the github release page ( https://github.com/hyperledger/cactus/releases ) or our ZenHub board (Hart: can we share this in a read-only way?).

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

We have had a very active quarter.

(Hart: add what you want to emphasize).

Current Plans

There are a lot of things we are working on completing. Ideally, we’d like to have a version 1.0 release in the not too distant future (maybe in the winter). There is a lot of work that needs to be done before we can get there, but here are some things we are currently doing:

(Hart: add what you want to emphasize).

In addition, for more precise plans, we encourage you to check out our ZenHub board or our extensive github issues list ( https://github.com/hyperledger/cactus/issues ). We have a solid tagging system in place that should let you sort by just about whatever you want to find types of issues that interest you.

Maintainer Diversity

We have not changed our four maintainers. They are:

Shingo Fujimoto – Fujitsu

Jonathan Hamilton – Accenture

Peter Somogyvari – Accenture

Takuma Takeuchi – Fujitsu

In the not too distant future, Jonathan Hamilton is planning on retiring as a maintainer, and someone (likely from Accenture) will take his place. We may also add additional maintainers (depending on how contributions come).

Contributor Diversity

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

Our contributor diversity has actually gone down this quarter. However, this is the rare case where this is not a bad thing: we have gotten a lot more contributors from Accenture, which was already our largest contingent of contributors. So we have lost diversity by gaining contributors.

Additional Information

We are continuing to work with the Weaver and Yui labs to see what, if any, common features we can utilize across projects. In particular, Peter is working on a “PoC” to see if we can do some basic integration.

We are also continuing work on our academic paper on a UC integration framework (which we can use to argue security for Cactus and potentially weaver).

Reviewed By

Comments:

Probably not the right place to discuss, but there was an action coming from a TSC meeting to discuss a potential plug in project during one of the Cactus calls. Can you comment on the outcomes from th"at meeting?

Posted by tkuhrt at Jul 13, 2021 12:55

Sure! We did in fact have a meeting on this. In summary, we determined that the most promising thing to work on for collaboration was what Cactus calls the "ledger plugin." These are the parts of the integration/interop systems that directly interact with and are dependent upon the various ledgers being "connected." As of now, because he is seemingly infinitely productive, Peter is working on a PoC to test compatibility between Weaver and Cactus at this level. He can of course give you many more details about this than I can. But we all view this as an excellent first step that hopefully leads to more collaboration (and, if not, we would always regret not trying).

I hope this answers your question!

Posted by hartm at Jul 14, 2021 18:46