crux VS additive-guis

Hi, a couple of my colleagues spent some time working on this integration with our open source database product (https://opencrux.com), and I'm curious to know - has anyone done similar things to connect Corda with a secondary off-the-shelf query engine?

For more details, see the release notes.

The context is that I work on on https://opencrux.com, which offers a bi-temporal Datalog query layer (as well as SQL) that more or less addresses the intersection of the two, since Datalog is great for expressing recursive queries.

I suppose another somewhat important distinction, once again performance related, is that graph databases will typically track index statistics to aid with query planning. For example, Crux uses stored knowledge of attribute-value cardinalities (recently via HyperLogLog) to optimise the join order of a query - this can make a big difference when attempting to traverse large graphs efficiently.

Agreed, recursive querying & bitemporal modelling in SQL are non-trivial problems, and the combination of the two is harder still. For an alternative perspective on tackling such problems I'd suggest looking at Datalog, which makes recursion a breeze, and a database with first-class bitemporality - both of which feature in https://opencrux.com (which I happen to work on :))

I work on Crux so can share a few details about our implementation of Datalog. The query is compiled into a kind of Worst-Case Optimal Join algorithm [0] which means that certain types of queries (e.g. cyclic graph-analytical queries, like counting triangles) are generally more efficient than what is possible with a non-WCOJ query execution strategy. However, the potency of this approach relies on the query planner calculating a good ordering of variables for the join order, and this is a hard problem in itself.

Crux is usually very competent at selecting a sensible variable ordering but when it makes a bad choice your query will take an unnecessary performance hit. The workaround for these situations is to break your query into smaller queries (since we don't wish to support any kind of hinting). Over the longer term we will be continuing to build more intelligent heuristics that make use of advanced population statistics. For instance we are about to merge a PR that uses HyperLogLog to inform attribute selectivity: https://github.com/juxt/crux/pull/1472

[0] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/chrismre/papers/paper49.Ngo.p...

Start from an empty file and write to an imaginary API what you actually want to do and coding is easy!

But when you start from an existing codebase, existing infrastructure, it slows to molasses.

I'm an advocate and trying to design what I call "commutative programming", which is another way of saying that the behaviour is the product of every statement about the behaviour that is desired, not an explicit instruction of what to do next which is what modern programming is and it is slow and tedious and doesn't compose.

We need query engines for behaviour.

I started work on a commutative GUI https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis but I'm also thinking from time to time about commutative code where we define refinements to desired behaviour and the computer query engine or rule engine generates the code that exhibits this behaviour.

For me desktop software feels extremely difficult to change and rearchitect to change swiftly.

A request/response server side application can be changed by adding endpoints, or redesigning or adding layers or database schemas but GUIs are hard to update easily by comparison because everything is so brittle and linked together so thoroughly.

I wrote toy proof of idea that GUIs could be additively defined declaratively. You define the layout by describing things in relationship to eachother rather than collection classes arranged in a tree. Behind the scenes, it IS a tree but in additive-guis in attempt to create GUIs that were responsive *to change of descriptions rather than declared positions*. you should be capable of describing the GUI with declarative description of how it should look *and* its behaviour.

https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis

Writing code to manually maintain widgets in a hierarchy is error prone and slow to develop and adapt and change.

I worked on an Android mobile banking application and I wouldn't want to rearchitect the application.

I would love to understand Qt better but I find it very hard to understand to architect good software as a GUI.

I have looked into immediate mode GUIs.

I started writing a layout engine based on ORC Solver paper but it's very early days

https://github.com/samsquire/browser for a simple screenshot. It can arrange things without overlapping them, similar to a flow layout. But I need to handle text properly.

In some ways Mozilla achieved the impossible: a truly cross platform, compatible desktop application infrastructure that is powerful and rich. It can play video, show images and play sound and do 3D graphics. Unfortunately the market doesn't value those things, it thinks of them as dated. Firefox market share where it is.

Everyone said they wanted independent implementations of standards but when Google Chrome came out, everyone including web developers and engineers were happy to move to it.

There's just too much technical complexity and knowledge required to know how to do things on each platform. Writing a cross platform desktop application is LOTS of fiddly effort.

I've wanted to create a GUI similar to IntelliJ Community Edition but I worry that the code shall be outside my reach in understandability.

I wrote a GUI framework that uses React API directly.

It's more proof of concept than useable, the idea is that we don't actually have to write layouts, we can just describe the layout with code or a template language and let the computer work it out.

https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis

https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis