Scala+Stellar Weekly Update June 7, 2020

Hi! 👋 This is the very first update for the Scala Stellar SDK. I hope to make some progress each week (even if it is just planning) and report on that progress publicly.

🧠 Thinking about

The previous week has seen big strides made in the SDK rebuild. I'm really enjoying implementing vertical slices, with a focus on the most important functionality and accentuating usability. I'm wondering how long it will take to achieve parity with the existing SDK, and how best to balance efforts between the new initiative and the existing one.

I watched Charlie Shrem's interview with Jed. It was really enjoyable. Early on Jed talks about his life-long focus on making useful things for people. Stellar's utility, and focus on worldwide financial inclusion is why was drawn to work on my little corner of it. I'm focusing on the SDK rebuild in order to improve on some of the mistakes of the first build and to provide an API that would best enable Scala developers to build interoperable payments applications.

🔙 Last Week

This week has been solely focused on the SDK rebuild:

Implemented the core Horizon type that can be constructed for different Horizon endpoints, but also for different effect types. Core Scala effect types are the first to be supported, with blocking (Try) and async (Future) methods out of the box.
The first target is to enable a payment transaction. To that end, I've implemented two query endpoints.
- Server capabilities - Primarily to find out what protocol version is in effect and whether Friendbot is enabled. (For now I'm considering to use testnet rather than the docker image, as the latter has a 5 minute start-up time).
- Account details - To get the sequence id.
I beefed up the README for the horizon sub-project and enabled scaladoc publishing.
Tested artifact publishing with jitpack
Created an exemplar project for getting started.