6 ms·

Hapi.js project is reaching its conclusion

73 points by kostarelo 6y ago

snowoutside 6y ago
This is really sad :( I hope there is more communication soon about the timeline.
- kostarelo 6y ago
  I would also like to hear more about this decision. Could probably be a financial decision?
jeremiahlee 6y ago
From the Hapi Slack: > eran 6:38 PM > Over the past few years I have tried many different ways to keep my work on the hapi ecosystem sustainable. I was trying to secure enough funds to keep the lights on but also to innovate and improve the framework. This has worked well for a while but over the past year both commercial licenses and sponsorship dropped to an all time low. At the current funding level I can only address critical issues and keep things stable. It doesn’t allow me to invest in the future of the framework, add meaningful new features, or keep up with community support.After 5 years of working outside of a major company, I have reached the point where I am no longer finding this work rewarding. The resources available do not allow me to spend the kind of quality time needed to have a meaningful engagement with this project. I no longer believe that this can be fixed or reversed. Go through another round of begging people for money in hope of another year or so for project runway is not appealing to me.I don’t know exactly how this will unfold. I plan to communicate this to the wider hapi community over the next few days to start a conversation and see what’s the best way for me to bring this project to an appropriate conclusion. This channel is the beginning of this process. While I am not expecting others to take over the work, I have not ruled that out yet.I want you to know that regardless of how this ends up, I am going to keep supporting the project until the end of the year. After that, I am going to offer some kind of continued commercial support for at least 2 years. I still need to work out the plan for what that support looks like and make sure that it is priced in a way that allows me to offer it.
- jiofih 6y ago
  This is the death of open-source. This is not open-source software. And exactly why OSS needs to exist - true community projects that are not dependent on sponsors or have any strings attached. I hope we find a way back there.
  - jeremiahlee 6y ago
    I hope Hapi and Joi can find a home in the Open JS Foundation.
    - detaro 6y ago
      The more important question is: is there a community around it that will develop and support it? that's what makes or breaks a project, and isn't something you get by joining a foundation.
gedy 6y ago
This was originally from Walmart Labs, no? Anyone know why they stopped being the corporate sponsor?
- thegoleffect 6y ago
  Most of the devs quit WalmartLabs a long time ago (including myself, Eran, etc). Sponsored in the sense that WalmartLabs paid us to use it to build their services and we developed hapi.js/joi to support our jobs.
  - gedy 6y ago
    Thanks for update and nice work for the community. I didn't end up taking job at WL, but Hapi greatly increased my technical opinion of them and was valuable for recruiting devs too.
  - tootie 6y ago
    I'm genuinely curious if anything produced by Walmart Labs had any sort of "commercial" success or was even adopted within the main Walmart ecosystem. I've certainly heard of hapi, but don't know if it ever gained all that much adoption. Or was it mostly a recruiting tool to make Walmart attractive to a better class of devs?
    - thegoleffect 6y ago
      While I was there, hapi.js was extensively used by the Global eCommerce department and was responsible for fronting the entire mobile API. You can check Eran's blog for stories of how it handled all of Walmart's mobile API traffic especially during the massive thundering herd of Black Friday traffic. It was used on many other projects including some "big name" projects, however, I don't know if hapi's involvement was made public for those so can't name them directly.
- kevstev 6y ago
  Eran left Walmart, and Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, who were co-heading Walmart Labs engineering (under the CTO) left shortly after to go back to Google. A new crew came in from PayPal, and they stripped all support of Hapi. They later created a heavy sludgey framework on top of it called Electrode for internal use and in slides did not even acknowledge it was Hapi underneath. I say this as someone who took over a good chunk of Eran's world when he left Walmart, and I was more or less forced to have my team, some of whom were spending most of their time working on Hapi.js, work on "real" stuff.
kschiffer 6y ago
Terrible news. This framework needs a future!
rodinia 6y ago
This hurts. I've been using Hapi professionally for 5 years now, and it is a joi (hehe) to work with. Modules in the hapi ecosystem, ie boom, joi, and lab, are baked into my servers from top to bottom. Much thanks to the devs that made this possible over the years. It is a shining example of what a JavaScript tool should be like. I wish it could be given the money and time it deserves.
yagodragon 6y ago
This is very sad. Hapi.js seriously tried to bring some sanity back to node.js development. Eran Hammer is a rock star. He did an amazing job, brought a super clean codebase, secure defaults etc but i feel the timing was bad. Hapi.js was good just for API's. Do you want to use it with a database? Good luck finding an orm and setting up migrations on your own. Meanwhile, in the last couple of years golang exploded and the node.js found it's niche in react server side rendering. I feel that every node.js MVC backend framework or the MERN stack of the 2015 era will become obsolete. That includes adonis.js , nest.js , meteor etc. I still haven't found any job description mentioning these frameworks. If you're looking for a backend language for your next project, look at python, php and rails and use javascript where it's good at, the front-end.
- claytongulick 6y ago
  This opinion doesn't seem to be backed by much evidence. The single-thread async-by-default execution model that nodejs shines at is brilliant for io bound tasks, like REST APIs. Go is fine and has it's strengths, but is by no means a nodejs killer. It's another tool in the toolbox. Reducing one of the most popular and effective modern server-side languages to "react server side rendering" is inaccurate, at best. It also ignores node's massive use in the embedded space, desktop (electron, nwjs, etc...) and emerging data science space. When I'm looking for a backend for my next project, it would be very hard to convince me to move backwards to python etc... Those feel very legacy to me. Slow, apartment threaded model with blocking io, tons of context thrash from thread switching, bad package management, difficult environment configuration, etc... I'll stick with node until there's another truly innovative technology that comes along.
  - kostarelo 6y ago
    Also, Node.js is doing just fine without a full-fledged framework like RoR or Django. In my current environment (~100 engineers, cross-functional teams, many Node.js services per pod), we have a few recommendations for libraries (Koa, knex, Passport, Boom, etc) but the glue on how to connect those are left to the engineer/pod. We don't feel the need for a stricter framework. Although I would like to hear other opinions on how that could be bad and if with a framework things would be better.

73 points by kostarelo 6y ago

snowoutside 6y ago

This is really sad :( I hope there is more communication soon about the timeline.

kostarelo 6y ago
I would also like to hear more about this decision. Could probably be a financial decision?

jeremiahlee 6y ago

From the Hapi Slack: > eran 6:38 PM > Over the past few years I have tried many different ways to keep my work on the hapi ecosystem sustainable. I was trying to secure enough funds to keep the lights on but also to innovate and improve the framework. This has worked well for a while but over the past year both commercial licenses and sponsorship dropped to an all time low. At the current funding level I can only address critical issues and keep things stable. It doesn’t allow me to invest in the future of the framework, add meaningful new features, or keep up with community support.After 5 years of working outside of a major company, I have reached the point where I am no longer finding this work rewarding. The resources available do not allow me to spend the kind of quality time needed to have a meaningful engagement with this project. I no longer believe that this can be fixed or reversed. Go through another round of begging people for money in hope of another year or so for project runway is not appealing to me.I don’t know exactly how this will unfold. I plan to communicate this to the wider hapi community over the next few days to start a conversation and see what’s the best way for me to bring this project to an appropriate conclusion. This channel is the beginning of this process. While I am not expecting others to take over the work, I have not ruled that out yet.I want you to know that regardless of how this ends up, I am going to keep supporting the project until the end of the year. After that, I am going to offer some kind of continued commercial support for at least 2 years. I still need to work out the plan for what that support looks like and make sure that it is priced in a way that allows me to offer it.

jiofih 6y ago
This is the death of open-source. This is not open-source software. And exactly why OSS needs to exist - true community projects that are not dependent on sponsors or have any strings attached. I hope we find a way back there.
- jeremiahlee 6y ago
  I hope Hapi and Joi can find a home in the Open JS Foundation.
  - detaro 6y ago
    The more important question is: is there a community around it that will develop and support it? that's what makes or breaks a project, and isn't something you get by joining a foundation.

gedy 6y ago

This was originally from Walmart Labs, no? Anyone know why they stopped being the corporate sponsor?

thegoleffect 6y ago
Most of the devs quit WalmartLabs a long time ago (including myself, Eran, etc). Sponsored in the sense that WalmartLabs paid us to use it to build their services and we developed hapi.js/joi to support our jobs.
- gedy 6y ago
  Thanks for update and nice work for the community. I didn't end up taking job at WL, but Hapi greatly increased my technical opinion of them and was valuable for recruiting devs too.
- tootie 6y ago
  I'm genuinely curious if anything produced by Walmart Labs had any sort of "commercial" success or was even adopted within the main Walmart ecosystem. I've certainly heard of hapi, but don't know if it ever gained all that much adoption. Or was it mostly a recruiting tool to make Walmart attractive to a better class of devs?
  - thegoleffect 6y ago
    While I was there, hapi.js was extensively used by the Global eCommerce department and was responsible for fronting the entire mobile API. You can check Eran's blog for stories of how it handled all of Walmart's mobile API traffic especially during the massive thundering herd of Black Friday traffic. It was used on many other projects including some "big name" projects, however, I don't know if hapi's involvement was made public for those so can't name them directly.
kevstev 6y ago
Eran left Walmart, and Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, who were co-heading Walmart Labs engineering (under the CTO) left shortly after to go back to Google. A new crew came in from PayPal, and they stripped all support of Hapi. They later created a heavy sludgey framework on top of it called Electrode for internal use and in slides did not even acknowledge it was Hapi underneath. I say this as someone who took over a good chunk of Eran's world when he left Walmart, and I was more or less forced to have my team, some of whom were spending most of their time working on Hapi.js, work on "real" stuff.

kschiffer 6y ago

Terrible news. This framework needs a future!

rodinia 6y ago

This hurts. I've been using Hapi professionally for 5 years now, and it is a joi (hehe) to work with. Modules in the hapi ecosystem, ie boom, joi, and lab, are baked into my servers from top to bottom. Much thanks to the devs that made this possible over the years. It is a shining example of what a JavaScript tool should be like. I wish it could be given the money and time it deserves.

yagodragon 6y ago

This is very sad. Hapi.js seriously tried to bring some sanity back to node.js development. Eran Hammer is a rock star. He did an amazing job, brought a super clean codebase, secure defaults etc but i feel the timing was bad. Hapi.js was good just for API's. Do you want to use it with a database? Good luck finding an orm and setting up migrations on your own. Meanwhile, in the last couple of years golang exploded and the node.js found it's niche in react server side rendering. I feel that every node.js MVC backend framework or the MERN stack of the 2015 era will become obsolete. That includes adonis.js , nest.js , meteor etc. I still haven't found any job description mentioning these frameworks. If you're looking for a backend language for your next project, look at python, php and rails and use javascript where it's good at, the front-end.

claytongulick 6y ago
This opinion doesn't seem to be backed by much evidence. The single-thread async-by-default execution model that nodejs shines at is brilliant for io bound tasks, like REST APIs. Go is fine and has it's strengths, but is by no means a nodejs killer. It's another tool in the toolbox. Reducing one of the most popular and effective modern server-side languages to "react server side rendering" is inaccurate, at best. It also ignores node's massive use in the embedded space, desktop (electron, nwjs, etc...) and emerging data science space. When I'm looking for a backend for my next project, it would be very hard to convince me to move backwards to python etc... Those feel very legacy to me. Slow, apartment threaded model with blocking io, tons of context thrash from thread switching, bad package management, difficult environment configuration, etc... I'll stick with node until there's another truly innovative technology that comes along.
- kostarelo 6y ago
  Also, Node.js is doing just fine without a full-fledged framework like RoR or Django. In my current environment (~100 engineers, cross-functional teams, many Node.js services per pod), we have a few recommendations for libraries (Koa, knex, Passport, Boom, etc) but the glue on how to connect those are left to the engineer/pod. We don't feel the need for a stricter framework. Although I would like to hear other opinions on how that could be bad and if with a framework things would be better.