Is this library abandoned?

[holyjak]

From unmerged PRs and unaddressed issues it seems this library is not maintained anymore. Perhaps we need to make our own fork, if we want to use it? Thank you.

[ashleymercer]

Hi @holyjak

Not abandoned, or at least that was not my intention! But I will admit it had rather slipped down my list, and for that I'm sorry.

I think it's worth giving some context here: the library is currently built against opentracing-java 0.31.0 because (as is the way of these things) that's the version I needed. It is stable and works (despite my dire warnings the README!) and is happily being used in production.

Since then, two further versions of opentracing-java (0.32 and 0.33) have been released: there are differences in the API between the three versions so it would take some work (probably different branches) to provide compatibility with all API versions concurrently. Alternatively we could support, say, only 0.33 but this would require users of the library to change their dependencies accordingly.

At around the time the first version of this library was completed, the OpenTelemetry initiative was announced: this aims to be the "one true API" for all observability / telemetry / metrics stuff. AWS staff are involved in this project and they are providing a native implementation the of OpenTelemetry APIs which talk to X-Ray: see for example AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

So I suppose it depends what your requirements are:

• for new projects my advice would be to use OpenTelemetry: this will be the standard going forwards, and is natively supported by AWS - there are even tools which will auto-instrument your code

• for existing projects which still have a dependency on the OpenTracing APIs, we could do some cleanup here to add support for new versions (0.32 / 0.33) and get deployments to maven central working

What would you need?

[holyjak]

Thanks a lot for the answer! I wasn't aware that OpenTelemetry is a new API replacing OpenTracing, I will absolutely check it out! (Since this is a new project.)

I guess it would be nice if this library was upgraded to the latest, i.e. 0.33 (I see there is a PR for that) and released to Maven Central for all those that cannot easily jump to O.T.