April 2023 Summaries

The Server 1.20 release introduced a new Temporal CLI, which combines efforts on the next version of tctl and temporalite to create a single temporal command-line tool. This tool allows users to run development versions of the Server and interact with it. It is recommended for use in development and testing, and will be supported for production scripts once v1 is released. The CLI can be installed using cURL, Homebrew, or manually downloading and adding the binary to PATH. Instructions are provided for running the Server, interacting with it, listing and describing Workflows, and managing environments. Upgrades from tctl include changes in global flags, command and flag names, output formatting options, and more. The CLI is currently at version 0.8.0, with a few issues remaining before the 1.0 release.

This month's newsletter highlights updates from Temporal v1.20, including new features such as simplified local development environment with Temporal CLI and Scheduled Actions for Workflows scheduling. The server has also seen improvements in Advanced Visibility on SQL, Archival overhaul, and more. SDK Updates include .NET Activity Worker and Client support, context-aware data converters in Java, Eager Workflow Start in Go, Python support for Scheduled Workflows, and AOT compilation support via GraalVM. The DevRel team has released new content and tutorials for various SDKs, including Python, TypeScript, and Go. Upcoming events include meetups and conferences such as DevOxx France, Pycon US, and DevOpsDays Denver. Community spotlight features an article by a community member on Sagas in Microservices. The newsletter also encourages users to reach out for design assistance or submit a CFP for Replay 2023.

In this blog post, the author introduces Small-Step Operational Semantics (SOS) and demonstrates its use in designing a tiny programming language called SagaLang for developing sagas. Sagas are long-running transactions that guarantee either exactly once or not at all execution. The author presents three iterations of SagaLang, each with different failure mitigation strategies: basic execution model, sagas with forward recovery, and sagas with backward recovery. While the language is minimalistic, it effectively illustrates the ideas behind SOS and its role in providing precise specifications for programming languages and systems.