v4 Goals

[dpopp07]

Breaking Changes

• Start returning Promises Seeking community feedback
• [speech-to-text] For recognizeUsingWebSocket, consider changing the default value of objectMode to true Seeking community feedback
• Get rid of the compatibility layer
• Remove support for Node 4.0
• Update all dependencies
• Remove LT v2
• Remove Dialog
• Remove Conversation
• Make the SDK more browser friendly
  • request -> axios (or fetch)
  • Confirm browser package works in frameworks like React and Angular
  • Confirm package works in React Native
• Filename is a required parameter for a number of methods (when the API wants filenames)
• Remove code dealing with cookies
• Remove support for JSON training data in NLC
• Remove all code dealing with the old api_key for VR
• [discovery] Remove compatibility support for array parameters in query and federatedQuery
• Remove Personality Insights v2

Non-breaking major changes

• Update tests to use jest and be more readable
• Rewire unit tests to be more modular and write more
• Make integration tests more robust and less error-prone
• Update error formatting to match APIs
• Create classes for each model in the services Seeking community feedback
• Services can be loaded independently using webpack

---

Would welcome some community feedback on some of these goals - do people want these things? Are there other implementations/packages we should be looking at? Any comments are appreciated!

[csantanapr]

I think is great to have support for promises, that way async/await can be used out of the box when calling this APIs.

[csantanapr]

Are we making progress towards to an mvp 4.x release?

[germanattanasio]

We are! The plan is to have an MVP ready next month

[csantanapr]

Thanks for the update

[mrutkows]

@germanattanasio any update? we are getting questions from our dev. advocates on why this is not available...

[dpopp07]

We are waiting until after THINK to release a new major version. There is also still some ongoing development work to meet the above goals. New estimate on the release is early March

[csantanapr]

@dpopp07 Hmm, can we get a basic 4.0 out, and then work on features for 4.1 ?

[dpopp07]

We can but we're working to get any breaking changes into 4.0. We're also coordinating with the other SDKs to make a synchronized major release. So there are a few moving parts. This is close to being ready

[dpopp07]

@csantanapr @mrutkows Once I finish a couple major issues I am working on, I will publish the v4.0 branch to npm as a beta release if you want to start looking at it. It should be mostly stable after these issues.

[dpopp07]

The release branch for v4.0.0 has been published as a release candidate on NPM. You can install this version with the tag next or 4.0.0-rc1. This RC is stable and functional but more breaking changes will be released. This RC includes support for Promises. A list of the changes made is documented here -> https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/node-sdk/blob/v4.0.0-branch/UPGRADE-4.0.md.

I am continuing to update this document. Please post in this thread with any questions, comments, or bugs!

[csantanapr]

@dpopp07 @germanattanasio I started integrating the v4 library and found a problem
Some sub components instead need to use v1-generated as the import instead of v1 like in 3.x
Why is that, it looks like some components use v1 and some not.
For example discovery

const DiscoveryV1 = require('watson-developer-cloud/discovery/discovery/v1-generated');

instead of before

const DiscoveryV1 =  require("watson-developer-cloud/discovery/v1")

[germanattanasio]

It should always be

const DiscoveryV1 =  require("watson-developer-cloud/discovery/v1")

This looks like an error.