Recently, Dubbo, alibaba’s high-performance distributed service framework, has gained more than 20,000 stars on Github. It is understood that this is the first and only Java open source product with more than 20,000 stars in China so far.

– No community, no product –

When it comes to open source products, the technical community has to be mentioned first. No community, no product. According to Alexa’s ranking, the most visited tech communities in the world are: Github – Alexa open source category 1, Apache-Alexa open source category 5, Gitlab – Alexa open source category 15, of course, there are also some vendors in the name of commercialization of good developer community also focused on a large number of developers, although the neutrality is not as good as some third-party developer sites, But in terms of business returns, it increases developer engagement, most notably with the Apple and Android developer communities.

So in terms of metrics, we can measure the popularity of the developer community in terms of both site visits and commercial returns. Then, from the perspective of community operation, we can:

  • Community size: number of registrations, length of stay per day, etc. The carrier of community is web page, the more page visitors, the more registration, the longer the page stay time, the higher the value of Web;
  • Community activity: maintenance by project sponsors, contribution by developers to open source projects, discussion within the community, precipitation of technical data, etc. The degree of activity depends on the degree of content contribution of participants. Taking open source and giving back to open source is the source of the continuous growth of the community.
  • Community performance: mainly process performance, code review time, bug closing time, etc. Many maintainers are focused on development, and the more committed they are, the stronger the community tends to be.
  • Community population characteristics: the distribution of the age and activity of community members, the distribution of the number of members in each age range and the corresponding activity. The ideal distribution is that the early members are active and contribute, the middle members become the main force of community project maintenance personnel, and more young developers join the community and grow in the community.
  • Diversity in the community: The more individual developers and the companies they work for, and the more evenly distributed their contributions, the healthier the community. It’s similar to the 2 b enterprise user distribution, if 80% of its sales distribution on top5 clients, that obviously is unhealthy, the diversity of the community is also the more guidance on the waist class project, participate in the contribution of the enterprise and individual developers, the more the more health, instead of just a few star or stars in feedback community developers.

– From idea to realization, the power of product

The vitality of the product is what keeps the community thriving, and developers are turning their ideas into reality with open source products, which is what open source products are all about. How do we evaluate an open source product? For open source products submitted on Github, the most direct way to evaluate the popularity of your project is the Star count. Github’s star count is different from weibo and wechat official accounts. You can increase fans and attract likes through advertising, sending red envelopes and some marketing methods such as fission. The number of stars on Github is far from a simple number. The number of stars shows the developers’ trust in the project. After all, developers will carry out secondary development on the project or even form private branches. It’s hard to get developers to invest the time and energy to try. So how does this trust come about? This involves all aspects of how to run an open source project.

  • Open Source project author: An open source project author is usually a project initiated by a team or individual, or by a group of developers from different enterprises. The Readme file shows the author information of an open source project. Through the author’s homepage, projects that focus on the project and have a large number of contributions in the recent year are more likely to gain credibility with the developer.
  • Readme file: A Readme file is like a self-introduction article that pops up after you pay attention to an official number. Through the layout design, content, and personalization of the article, you can often learn some of the temperament of the official number. If it is aimed at developers readme, compact layout, project is introduced in detail, including the project structure, characteristics, how to get started, contact information, developers how to contribute, submit bug format, support the development of language, as well as other necessary project information, the detailed introduction, clear structure, the more likely to win the trust of the developer.
  • Number of issues and maintenance status: How many open issues are there in the project, how many are closed issues, whether the submission time of developers in open issues is the latest, and how long is the reply time of open issues? These indicators are the most direct embodiment of the vitality of open source projects. The more developers, the more issues will be raised. The shorter it takes to respond and resolve the issue.
  • Number of forks and PR (pull Request) : After forking, the developer has writable permission on the project. The more forks, the more valuable the project is to the developer. Pull request is when you Fork and make some changes to your code, either to fix a bug, or to make other changes that you think will help your project, and then pull the request to the project maintainer, and the maintainer decides whether or not to merge, so the more pull requests you make, The more developers are deeply involved in the project.

Others including commits, releases, and Fiolines are important indicators of a thriving genomics project.

– New Dubbo, new ecology –

Dubbo is a distributed service governance framework opened by Alibaba in 2012. It is committed to providing high-performance and transparent RPC remote service invocation solutions and SOA service governance solutions, enabling applications to achieve the output and input functions of services through high-performance RPC, and seamlessly integrating with the Spring framework. Currently, it is one of the most influential and widely used open source service frameworks in China.

  • Dubbo’s history: » In 2008, Alibaba started using Dubbo internally;

In early 2009, version 1.0 was released; » In October 2011, Alibaba announced open source, version 2.0.7; » In 2014, Dangdang fork Dubbo version, named Dubbox-2.8.0, and support HTTP REST protocol; » In October 2014, version 2.3.11 was released and then stopped. » In September 2017, Alibaba restarted maintenance, focused on upgrading JDK and component versions, and released version 2.5.4/5. » In February 2018, Alibaba announced that Dubbo would be donated to Apache and entered the Apache incubator. » In July 2018, the official domain name of Dubbo was updated to Dubbo.apache.org. The page took on a new look, and the brand was fully upgraded with the new logo.

  • New Dubbo — New logo & New official website & New ecology

This comprehensive upgrade of the brand is not only a continuation of the Dubbo team’s renewed maintenance since September 2017 to give back to the community, but also indicates that the Dubbo team is welcoming developers and users with a new look. The latest logo uses a gradient of bright purple to bright blue to symbolize Dubbo’s youth and vitality. The five letters D-U-B-B-O are embedded in the code with the more frequently used [], / and:, which means Dubbo was born in the code and gives back to the original intention of the developers. The latest official website adopts the gradual color consistent with the new logo, the whole page is simple and generous, in line with the temperament of the developer community, the home page into the continuous meteor across the dynamic effect, but also for the prosperity of Dubbo ecology, Puhui all use Dubbo developers and Dubbo itself.

The new official website is further enriched with documentation, blogs and community content, and is available in Both English and Chinese for developers and users around the world, providing a solid content base to build Dubbo’s new ecosystem.

The document module consists of user document, developer guide and operation and maintenance management. User documentation includes getting started, quick start, dependencies, maturity, configuration, examples, multi-dimensional usage reference manuals, best time to service, and usage reports. The developer guide covers source code building, framework design, extension point loading, implementation details, SPI extension implementation, common contracts, coding conventions, design principles, version management, contributions, checklists, bad smells, technology compatibility testing, and more. O&m management includes installation manuals and O&M manuals. The document covers almost everything that might be involved in the development and use of Dubbo and the details that need to be paid attention to, helping developers to use the distributed services governance framework without barriers and one-stop.

The new website also provides a blog feature, where developers can record their own development process, participate in the ecological construction, and leave their own footprints in the development process of Dubbo. On the community page of the new website, there are four sections: Events & News, Ecosystem, Contact us, and contribute guidelines. Here, find the latest Dubbo developer salons and industry updates, and reach out to Dubbo project members via email, Gitter, Segment Fault, and Twitter for immediate feedback.

Dubbo provides detailed guidelines for Contributing, including joining mailing lists for discussion, reporting defects, document optimization, and submitting PR fixes. Developers can find the details under the Contributing category in the README on Dubbo’s Github home page.

Dubbo has attracted the attention of developers both at home and abroad due to its strong performance, rich features, detailed Documentation in Both Chinese and English, and Alibaba’s continuous investment in open source.

  • Good compatibility support: Support Java, Node. js, Python, PHP and other development languages, support API to start Spring XML, Spring annotation, Plain Java, Spring Boot, It supports the formation of open source registries such as Zookeeper, Redis, Simple Multicast and Etcd3, and includes a variety of fault tolerance mechanisms, load balancing strategies, various communication protocols, network transmission extension and serialization mechanisms, which greatly improves the development freedom of developers and avoids bundling.
  • Rich industry practice: In addition to the large number of internal alibaba apps that are using Dubbo, Including kingdee, dangdang, drops travel, where nets, snatched a liquidation, netease koala, zheng cloud, China life, haier, China telecom, small shops, such as the industrial and commercial bank of China from the government, banking, insurance, software development, Internet, manufacturing, telecommunications and other industries users are based on the Dubbo building enterprise own micro service, develop the return;
  • Complete developer ecosystem: In Github, there have been 2434commits, 52 releases, 95 communities and 13,970 forks. 650 PR posts have been combined and 1,047 issues have been solved. Open’s 381 issues have a high response rate and response speed from the community, which is helping the project gain more trust from developers.

In less than a year after the restart, Dubbo released 10 versions, entered the Apache incubator, launched Dubbo’s new official website and new Logo, and held developer salons in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen to strengthen close communication. Dubbo is destined to enjoy a different life.