Ketrew Industries Two Hundred

27 Nov 2015

We went to Vancouver to present Ketrew and its younger sibling Biokepi at the OCaml 2015 workshop (cf. video and slides). As for many other projects, the talk deadline triggered a new release for Ketrew a few days earlier: 2.0.0.

The main novelty is a WebUI, so we can be all webly and start by pasting a huge animated GIF:

The new graphical interface fully runs in the browser while sharing the same protocol as the Text-based UI (cf. protocol.mli). It was written in about two months thanks to js_of_ocaml. We used Tyxml_js for typed HTML5 tree manipulation within OCaml, together with the react library (the original one, not Facebook’s name-stealing “React”).

Overall, going on a programming spree with Tyxml_js + React has been a really fun and pleasant experience. It’s difficult to believe that some people in the world build reactive UIs without a decent type system.

This release comes with a few other miscellaneous changes:

• We made it easier to get started:
  • We made the command ketrew init much more clever: it can create much more complex ready-to-use configuration files.
  • We added the option to run the HTTP server without TLS.
  • We wrote a more accessible “Getting Started” documentation.
• We improved the YARN backend (incl. talking a bit with its HTTP API).
• We took the chance to do some backwards incompatible changes to the EDSL API since other changes were already triggering a major version change.

The next release will be coming soon, with many backwards compatible changes.

• Ketrew, through Trakeva, will be able to use other database backends for the configuration file (currently PostgresQL is being stress-tested). One can also backup and synchronize between database backends.
• Much better scalability of the engine and WebUI.
• Parsable and searchable logs for admins.
• More configurability for the WebUI.

We have been using Ketrew 2.0.0 with Biokepi for a while now, and would appreciate help breaking it!