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- LTS release available
- Project developers have been spending a larger percentage of time on maintenance and support than in the past, given the increasing number of production deployments and two LTS releases.
- Lower commit velocity on new features .in core Fabric, more activity around extensions in Hyperledger labs
- Healthy RFC process with reviews in contributor meetings to drive consensus on new features.
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v2.2 is the current LTS releases with patch releases quarterly. v1.4 LTS went end of support in April 2021. Production users are encouraged to use v2.2, users that who want to try new features can are encouraged to use v2.3 and v2.4.0-alpha and provide feedback.
Releases past quarter:
- v1.4.12 - April 23, 2021
- v2.2.3 - April 23, 2021
- v2.3.2 - April 23, 2021
- v2.4.0-alpha - April 15, 2021
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- WASM for smart contracts
- BFT ordering service
- Modular crypto service
- OpenTelemetry
There has also been a significant amount of Fabric activity in Hyperledger Labs, a few highlights:
- https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-smart-client
- https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-token-sdk
- https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-operations-console
- https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/minifabric
- https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-opssc
- https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/mirbft
Current Plans
The largest item being worked in 2021 is the Fabric Gateway, a new component that will implement much of the high-level 'gateway' programming model. This will remove much of the transaction submission and query logic from the client application and shift it to a common gateway running within the Fabric peer, enabling each of the various client SDKs to be slimmer, more consistent, and require less maintenance. It will also simplify the administrative overhead of running a Fabric network because client applications will be able to connect and submit transactions via a single network port rather than the current situation where ports have to be opened from a client application to multiple peers across potentially multiple organizations. The Fabric Gateway is expected to be function complete for a Q3 v2.4.0-beta release.
Other work items in plan or in progress:
- A feature to purge private data stores, which will help solutions meet GDPR requirements. An RFC is expected so that we can gather additional feedback from the community.
- A feature to unjoin a peer from a channel.
- A more realistic Node.js SDK sample application demonstrating good practices (connection management, error handling, timeouts, retries, etc)
- Guidance for kubernetes deployments
Additional discussion of Fabric roadmap can be found in this contributor meeting recording.
Maintainer Diversity
Two maintainers retired this quarter. 5 of 10 maintainers are from IBM.
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- Q2 2020 - 1140 commits. 67% from IBM.
- Q2 2021 - 396 commits. 54% from IBM
Year to year comparison, by contributor:
- Q2 2020 - 96 contributors. 38% from IBM.
- Q2 2021 - 77 contributors. 22% from IBM.
Additional Information
Link to the Fabric dashboard: Q2 2021
Reviewed By
- Angelo De Caro
- Arnaud J Le Hors
- Arun S M
- Baohua Yang
- Bobbi Muscara
- Danno Ferrin
- David Enyeart
- Gari Singh
- Grace Hartley
- Hart Montgomery
- Maria Teresa Nieto
- Mark Wagner
- Nathan George
- Tracy Kuhrt
- Troy Ronda