Some notes from the 2021-05-05 Oxalis Community technical meeting

[jannewaren]

There was a technical meeting via Teams today. Quite a lot of participants from different companies and good discussions. Thanks for everyone who joined and let's have more of these in the future!

# Updating to Oxalis 5 and testing it together

We discussed the situation where people are with Oxalis 5. At least none of the participants the meeting have it up and running yet but some are working on it. There was a report from Logiq that it works fine otherwise but some kind of a java.lang.NullPointerException problem with lookups.

There is an issue in Github about it (#513) and it was discussed that it probably needs a new release to be made to fix. So we should take a look at that.

It was also mentioned that when anyone gets their Oxalis 5 running in the testing environment, we could test it a bit together. For example post a participant identifier into the Github discussions and others could try to send something to you, in the testing environment.

# General discussion how are people using Oxalis

We discussed how people are using Oxalis. Using in the cloud (for example Azure and AWS) and with Docker was mentioned several times. We discussed the standalone sender component and if it would make sense to have some other kind of interface to use Oxalis for sending. Some are using the standalone sender, basically moving files to a disk and launching the send. While that does work it has some issues with performance. Some have built their own HTTP API's in front of Oxalis to have a clean interface with Oxalis to the rest of their system.

It was discussed if it would make sense for Oxalis to include something like this out of the box, as the standalone sender kind of was not meant for production use but it is used a lot in production anyways.

No conclusion really, just discussion. Maybe we can just continue on that.

Also plugins were discussed. Probably multiple service providers have implemented some plugins to get rid of the old fashioned moving a batch of files from a disk to another disk. For example the payload can be stored directly in cloud storage (for example AWS S3). It was discussed that maybe those implementations could be open sourced to the community for everyone's benefit for smooth and reliable transport of documents.

# Unnecessary dependencies in Oxalis

It was mentioned that Oxalis has in some ways become a bit bloated through the years. There are a lot of dependencies and it is not entirely clear are all of those really really necessary.

Could be an opportunity to clean up a bit and get rid of some dependencies. For example Google Guice (or maybe Guava?) has caused some problems in the past.

This brings us to Java versions and the fact that we might be stuck for now with a really old version. Most teams are using Java 8 and the Docker images are based on that. That is a pretty old version and experience is that some dependency updates are blocking us from updating to new Java versions.

Something should be done in order to get us to new Java versions. Not sure what exactly but we can continue on this discussion and try something out.

# Timeouts with big files

The problems with big files after AS4 were discussed. Many expirience this problem and it is expected to get worse once the new Peppol agreement framework actually (maybe) says something about the file sizes. It might be 100MB or something like that. And those files cause issues, even 30-60MB cause issues now.

It was reported that there once was a fix for this in Oxalis (OxalisCommunity/Oxalis-AS4#84) but that it was removed at some point. It was reported that re-implementing this fix makes it a lot faster. We should investigate if there is something to fix or not related to BounceCastle and the encryption/decryption speed.

Also it was discussed what is the default timeout values in Oxalis (is it 1 minute?) and is there a possibility to change default timeouts to 5 minutes in Oxalis? 5 minutes vs 1 minutes does help with the issue.