With LoopBack 3 going end-of-life at the end of 2020, we are continuing to focus on the following areas:
- finish the migration guide to help LB3 users to migrate their applications to LB4
- offer some level of tooling support to make the migration easier
- fill in feature parity gaps by either implementing the features in LB4 or recommending a solution using existing libraries
- Integrate LoopBack 4 into IBM API Connect
While enhancing our core code base, we'd like to continue to explore the possibility of using and/or integrating latest technologies with LoopBack 4.
Some of the areas we'd like to explore, but not limited to:
- messaging and pub/sub event style, e.g. Kafka, MQTT
- cloud native integration
- native support on GraphQL
- modernize the connector infrastructure and code base
Community contributions are vital to us. It not only accelerates our development, but also helps building deep LoopBack knowledge in the community.
We would like to encourage community contributions by make available to the
community a list of GH issues that we want to finish in a short term by using
the help wanted
and 2020Qx
labels.
We published a blog earlier to invite our community to enrich LoopBack and its community together. We continue to encourage more participation and contributions from our users by sharing our plans on some of the areas.
- Blogs to share our plans on:
- modernizing the data access layer
- multi-tenancy
- Potential joint blogs on:
- Mocha on parallel testing work
- TypeGraphQL on GraphQL extension
- Continuous improvement on documentation and developer experience, for example,
- Move recipes to how-to guides (epic): #5783
- Enhancement on Express TypeScript definitions
- Web socket support
- Pub/sub messaging support
- Test/Enable Node.js 14
- Participate in Hacktoberfest
Details to be discussed in #5113
- identify gaps and add documentation
- reorganize documentation to make it easier to navigate
- Fix docs issues: https://github.com/loopbackio/loopback-next/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Adocs
- Model relations
- Model relation ease of use improvements
- LB4 equivalent of
lb soap
#5282 - Execute raw NoSQL queries (e.g. MongoDB) #3342
- https://github.com/loopbackio/loopback-next/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22feature+parity%22+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc
Details to be discussed in #5669 and linked issues.
- mocha parallel testing
- identify and investigate tests taking a longer time
- first iteration to consider:
loopback-next
,loopback.io
andloopback-datasource-juggler
.
- Finish migration guide for both general runtime and authentication & authorization.
- Implement the feature parity tasks that are highly requested by users
- Finish the APIC/LB integration
- Continue with bugs and developer experience improvements
- Complete Migration guide between LB3 and LB4 MVP
- Migrate LB3 SDK client: Spike on migrating Angular client. Will ask for user feedback if there is a need for Android/iOS/other SDK client.
- File upload with multipart/form-data
- Custom visual style of REST API Explorer
- ENUM type: good candidate to ask for community contribution
- From model definition to REST API with no custom repository/controller classes #2036
- (stretch goal) From relation definition to REST API with auto-generated repository/controller classes #2483
- Make sure there is documentation how one can import OpenAPIv3 from LoopBack and import into API Connect. Documentation could be in loopback.io or API Connect Knowledge Center
- Update APIC toolkit to include LoopBack 4
- Import API story:
- OpenAPI enhancer service with APIC OpenAPI enhancer extension
- Article to IBM Developer site
- Eventually test with shopping app #4498
- Replace "request" with something else #2672
- Investigate the possibility to reduce build time, e.g. Use TypeScript project reference with 3.8, using yarn/pnpm instead of npm.
- Investigate the possibility to reduce test time, e.g. run mocha tests in parallel.
Includes migrating Useful LB3 Documentation to LB4.
- Docs: Add "Working with Data" section #2527
- Tutorial on file upload: with example repo and how to customize for your own use case.
- Running and debuggin apps
- debug string #4845
- error handling - how to configure http response to configure error. how to report error from controller (see strong-error-handler) #4846
- project layout reference https://loopback.io/doc/en/lb3/Project-layout-reference.html #4847
- (stretch goal) consider the possible rearrangement in sidebar items on security advisories, contributing to LB, LTS to LB4 site
-
Articles/materials that can help more users adopting LoopBack 4
- write an article about what LB can offer on top of Express #4852
- Write an article/docs on "from API to UI: LoopBack + Angular" - using client generator #4849
- write an article about LB + TypeORM/Sequelize/Mongoose/Prisma. #4853 for TypeORM
-
Building reusable workshop material - possibly for NodeConf.EU, CASCON, etc.
- Migration: it will continue to be our focus, including filling up the details to the migration guide and adding tooling to make migration easier.
- Tackle issues labelled as
bug
ordeveloper experience
- Issue cleanup: take some time to triage open issues and possibly some smaller enhancements that we never get the time to do.
- Migration guide #453
- continue the work in Q4 2019 for migrating:
- boot scripts
- model mixins
- remoting hooks
- continue the work in Q4 2019 for migrating:
- Tooling:
- improve existing commands like
import-lb3-models
- add new commands (e.g. import datasources).
- improve existing commands like
- Auth0 example: Create a more realistic example than https://github.com/raymondfeng/loopback4-example-auth0.
- Spike on getting APIs created from LB4 imported into APIC, #4115
- Dynamic binding/rebinding of controllers after app start #433
- How to build models, repositories and controllers dynamically at runtime #4296
- Docs for exposing REST API of a Model with no custom classes #2740 (stretch goal)
- Would like to put more time in tackling those. Will plan it as part of the monthly milestone planning.
From model definition to REST API with no custom repository/controller classes #2036
- Add CrudRestApiBuilder to @loopback/rest-crud #3737
- Example app showing CrudRestApiBuilder #3738
Robust handling of ObjectID type for MongoDB #3720
- Spike: robust handling of ObjectID type for MongoDB, #3456
- clean up authentication and authorization
In Q4 2019, here are the stories we would like to focus on:
- wrap up on authentication and authorization stories
- continue with
Inclusion of Related Models
epic - add more support for declarative support - From model definition to REST API with no custom repository/controller classes
- revisit the migration story targeting to have a migration guide
- Token based authentication in API Explorer (Spike done in Q3)
- Refactoring, #1996
Finish the MVP scope as tracked by Epic #1352
- Reject create/update requests when data contains navigational properties #3439
- Add inclusion resolvers to lb4 relation CLI #3451
- Verify relation type in resolve{Relation}Metadata #3440
- Run repository tests for PostgreSQL #3436
- Run repository tests for Cloudant #3437
- Blog post: announce Inclusion of related models #3452
See the post-MVP Epic for the list of stories out of scope of the initial release: #3585
The Epic: #2036
- Improve
defineCrudRestController
to create a named controller class #3732 - Add
defineCrudRepositoryClass
- a helper to create a named repository class #3733 - Model API booter & builder #3736
- Add CrudRestApiBuilder to
@loopback/rest-crud
#3737 - Example app showing CrudRestApiBuilder #3738
Stretch goals:
- From relation definition to REST API with auto-generated repository/controller classes #2483
- From datasource config to Service REST API with no proxy/controller classes #3717
The Epic: #453
- Spike 1: General runtime - see #3718
- Spike 2: Authentication & authorization - see #3719
- Prioritize & plan follow-up issues identified in the spikes
The Epic: #3720
Production deployment/logging/monitoring, #1054
- Blog post showing the microservice version of shopping example and mention what's the gaps, #3715
Test/Enable Node.js 12 support for connectors - #3072
- loopback-connector-kv-redis
- loopback-connector-grpc
- Workshop "Write scalable and extensible Node.js applications using LoopBack 4", https://pheedloop.com/cascon/site/sessions/?id=OhNsKW
- Poster "REST APIs with LoopBack 4 and OpenAPI 3", https://pheedloop.com/cascon/site/sessions/?id=DugCzZ
In Q3, there are a few groups of tasks we'd like to work on:
- Continue with the stories from Q2: Authentication, Authorization, Inclusion of Related models
- Feature parity gap: Declarative support
- Internal tooling/infrastructure: support Node.js 12 in juggler & connectors, reduce build time, etc.
- Juggler-next: some groundwork to prepare us to work on juggler-next, e.g. spike on how the code resides affect our build process
- Token based authentication in API Explorer. Spike
- Stretch goal: enable class level
@authenticate
decorator: #2460
- Complete the
Add authorization component
PR: loopbackio/loopback.io#857 - Common layer for authentication & authorization #2900
- Add authorization to example-shopping repo
Inclusion of Related Models #1352
- awaiting to @bajtos' spike to create the tasks
From model definition to REST API with no custom repository/controller classes (Declarative Support) #2036
- Fix CI for dashdb
- Fix CI for db2 connector
- Fix CI for loopback-connector-postgresql for Node.js 10
- Stretch goal: Test juggler 3.x and 4.x on connectors
Support of Node.js 12 #3072
- Spike: Investigate setting up Windows CI workflow for connectors using Azure Pipelines, #3161
- Tasks created according to this proposal: #2925
- Review of DB2 connector on IBM i
-
Developer Experience (Pick a few): https://github.com/loopbackio/loopback-next/issues?utf8=✓&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+-label%3A%22good+first+issue%22+-label%3A%22help+wanted%22+label%3Adeveloper-experience+
- Improve current juggler v4 to allow connectors to implement DAO/KVAO methods as async functions returning a promise (not accepting a callback).
- Rework loopback-connector from ES5 codebase to ES2017 (class keyword, async functions). This is a breaking change for connectors consuming this module, but should be done in backwards-compatible way from the point of view of LB4 applications.
- Upgrade most (if not all) of our connectors to use the new major version of loopback-connector, leverage class inheritance and async functions.
- Convert base repo (e.g. loopback-connector) and more popular connectors to TypeScript and to use async/await
- Operation hooks. Spike
- REST layer improvement #1452
- controller cannot control the header and content type. use case: file download.
- Validation
- Advanced validation - e.g. email validation - not supported in json schema. AJV allows to support certain keywords. Spike.
- AJV only validating in request body but not validating parameters, queries
- validation in juggler