Hello Flink PMCs and Flink Scala Users, I would like to propose an idea to take the 3rd party Scala API findify/flink-scala-api <https://github.com/findify/flink-scala-api> project into the Apache Flink organization.
*Motivation * The Scala-free Flink idea was finally implemented by the 1.15 release and allowed Flink users to bring their own Scala version and use it via the Flink Java API. See blog-post here: Scala Free in One Fifteen <https://flink.apache.org/2022/02/22/scala-free-in-one-fifteen/>. Also, existing Flink Scala API will be deprecated, because it is too hard to upgrade it to Scala 2.13 or 3. Taking into account my Scala experience for the last 8 years, I predict these wrappers will eventually be abandoned, unless such a Scala library is a part of some bigger community like ASF. Also, non-official Scala API will lead people to play safe and choose Java API only, even if they did want that at the beginning. https://github.com/findify/flink-scala-api has already advanced and implemented Scala support for 2.13 and 3 versions on top of Flink Java API. As I know, FIndify does not want or does not have a capacity to maintain this library. I propose to fork this great library and create a new Flink project with its own version and build process (SBT, not Maven), which would be similar to the StateFun or FlinkML projects. *Proposal * 1. Create a fork of findify/flink-scala-api and host in Apache Flink Git space (PMCs please advise). 2. I and Roman <https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ViewProfile.jspa?name=rgrebennikov> would be willing to maintain this library in future for the next several years. Further, we believe it will live on its own. 3. Flink Docs: PMCs, we need your guidelines here. One way I see is to create new documentation in a similar way as StateFun docs. Alternatively, we could just fix existing Flink Scala code examples to make sure they work with the new wrapper. In any case, I see docs will be upgraded/fixed gradually. I hope you will find this idea interesting and worth going forward. P.S. The irony here is that findify/flink-scala-api was also a fork of Flink Scala-API some time ago, so we have a chance to close the loop :-) Best regards. Alexey
