Hello Everyone, *If you identify yourself on the Beam learning journey, even if this is your first day, please see yourself as a welcome participant in this conversation and consider reviewing the bottom portion of this email for guidance.*
*The Short Version (For those with Java Beam SDK knowledge)*: Should we migrate FileIO / TextIO and related classes from :sdks:java:core to :sdks:java:io:file? If so, should we target such a migration to a future Beam version with repeated announcements? Does the Beam repository have any example of a similar change in the past? What learnings from said past change could be potentially applied to this one? *The Long Version (For those on the learning path)*: This email is more about our repository organization rather than Beam. The proposal is to move two highly used classes (and anything related) in our Java SDK called FileIO [1] and TextIO [2]. The Beam GitHub repository uses a software called gradle [3], to automate routine code tasks such as build and test. Gradle projects, such as Beam, organize code in what are called modules [4]. The three main ingredients that make a module are 1) a unique directory path, 2) a file called build.gradle (or build.gradle.kts) in this directory, 3) referencing the gradle module in a settings.gradle (or settings.gradle.kts) file at the root of the repository. The gradle documentation discusses why such organization might matter and how to achieve this with large projects [5]. Essentially, modules allow us to have mini-projects inside our large project and focus related automations to this one focused portion of our larger repository. In Beam, we have the module :sdks:java:core [6] with all things related to the core of Beam, whereas we have separate modules related to reading from and writing to various resources within :sdks:java:io [7]. The proposal suggests moving the aforementioned file reading and writing classes, FileIO and TextIO, and anything related, to its own :sdks:java:io:file module. This would correspond to a new sdks/java/io/file directory and moving these classes into sdks/java/io/file/main/java/org/apache/beam/sdk/io/file. *Definitions / References*: 1. FileIO - a General-purpose transforms for working with files: listing files (matching), reading and writing. See - https://beam.apache.org/releases/javadoc/current/org/apache/beam/sdk/io/FileIO.html 2. TextIO - Similar to FileIO but focused on text files. See https://beam.apache.org/releases/javadoc/current/org/apache/beam/sdk/io/TextIO.html 3. Gradle - a build automation tool used by the Apache Beam repository to automate code-related tasks. See https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/what_is_gradle.html 4. Gradle Module - a subsection of your larger repository. See https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/dependency_management_terminology.html#sub:terminology_module 5. Structuring Large Projects with Gradle - https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/structuring_software_products.html 6. sdks:java:core - Corresponds to the sdks/java/core repository directory. See https://github.com/apache/beam/tree/master/sdks/java/core 7. sdks:java:io - Corresponds to the sdks/java/io repository directory. See https://github.com/apache/beam/tree/master/sdks/java/io Best, Damon
