Month: October 2016

Dev meeting – IntelliJ IDEA XQuery, and AWS Lambda

Reece talked about the work that he’s been doing on an improved XQuery plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. This was inspired by some annoyances he was encountering with the existing XQuery plugin – although it’s generally good, it doesn’t have complete support for MarkLogic’s brand of XQuery, and it doesn’t correctly parse all XQuery.

Reece’s implementation covers more areas of the XQuery language, has better error reporting for issues in your XQuery code, can check for file encoding issues, supports Find Usages, and has a number of other features.

Reece is uploading his XQuery plugin to the Jetbrains repository this weekend, so it should soon be publicly available.

Joe and Chris talked about the work that we’ve been doing with AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda is what Joe hoped that cloud computing would be all along. AWS EC2 is a server in the cloud, but not fundamentally different from having a server on your own network. However, AWS Lambda is effectively serverless – you upload a piece of code, and then it runs without you worrying about the infrastructure at all. However, the underlying infrastructure can make a difference to you, in terms of the latency of invoking it when it hasn’t recently been called.

We are using AWS Lambda as part of a filter for an Amazon SQS queue. We’re testing it using an SBT plugin – SBTMocha. The challenges with testing it are:

  • When uploading the lambda, you don’t need the AWS libraries. However, when you’re testing it locally, you need to have the AWS library available. We dealt with this by separating the AWS-specific content from the testable content, and just testing the interesting part that doesn’t depend on AWS.
  • We have a number of environments: dev, qa, production. The configuration for the function needs to vary between each of them. The standard way of dealing with this is to include a “conf” directory as part of the upload, from which the lambda reads its configuration. Our build process in Jenkins constructs an appropriate zip file for the environment.

Using Lambda has been very useful for us – it has removed the need for a server.