Future of the EXPath Crypto spec and libs

[joewiz]

As I mentioned on last Monday's eXist-db Community Call, @claudius108 informed me of the good news that he is working on a PhD. Congratulations, Claudius!

For the EXPath community, this means that we need to find new maintainers for the EXPath Crypto java library and eXist implementations and a new editor for the underlying specification. Respectively, these projects reside in https://github.com/claudius108/crypto-java-lib and https://github.com/eXist-db/crypto-exist-java-lib, and Claudius's most recent work on the v2 of the spec lives in https://github.com/claudius108/expath-cg/commits/master/specs/crypto (a fork of https://github.com/expath/expath-cg/commits/master/specs/crypto).

To my knowledge, past contributions to the crypto project besides Claudius's have come from @chakl, @adamretter, and @nsincaglia. I also know that @ChristianGruen has implemented the crypto spec for BaseX (see https://docs.basex.org/wiki/Cryptographic_Module). It's great that we have 2 implementations of the Crypto spec, and I think this state of affairs should continue if at all possible.

I would be grateful if Olaf, Adam, Nick, Christian, or any members of the EXPath, BaseX, and eXist (@eXist-db/core) communities could chime in here with their priorities for the future of this project. I know that many projects rely on the crypto library, including mine. It would be great to know what plans, if any, are currently in place for continued maintenance or development of this project.

To start discussion off, my project depends on the crypto library: one app that talks to the Twitter API uses the crypto:hmac function, and another that talks to the Amazon AWS S3 API uses the crypto:hash function. I recall that @chakl extended the crypto library to perform some functions needed for the eXist SAML implementation.

So, here are my questions:

1. What are you using the Crypto lib for?
2. What resources could you provide for continued maintenance or development of the EXPath Crypto spec and/or libs?

p.s. Thanks to @claudius108 for his enormous contributions as editor and implementor of the EXPath Crypto spec! Good luck in your endeavors!