Open Source Process: jQuery by John Resig
- 1. Open Source Process: jQuery John Resig http://ejohn.org/ - http://twitter.com/jeresig
- 2. jQuery ✦ A JavaScript library designed to hide painful cross-browser compatibility issues while presenting a solid, usable, API.
- 3. Simple API ✦ $(“div > span”).addClass(“foo”); ✦ “Find some elements” ✦ “Do something with them” ✦ Makes complex manipulation of web pages simple
- 4. Points of Concern ✦ Primary issues: ✦ Quality of API ✦ Quality of browser-issue-hiding ✦ Other issues: ✦ Speed, community, licensing, development team, openness, test coverage, API documentation, tutorials, books, demos
- 5. Space ✦ Highly competitive space ✦ Released Jan. 2006 - already a dominant player: Prototype JavaScript Library ✦ (Bundled with Ruby on Rails, had some nice coattail growth.) ✦ Other libraries: Dojo, Yahoo UI, MooTools
- 8. Things That Are Important ✦ Technical ✦ API Design (Usability, documentation) ✦ Code Quality (Licensing, openness, test coverage) ✦ Non-technical ✦ Community (Resources, responsiveness) ✦ Learning Aides (Tutorials, books, demos)
- 9. What it all boils down to... ✦ How quickly can you get your user hooked - and are you giving them room, and the resources, to grow? ✦ Put yourself in your user’s shoes.
- 10. Se In H co te om nd gr ep at Ap io ag p n e Ex Vi pl AP ew or ID Tu eA oc t or PI s ial Co D m ow Ex te m nl un oa nd i ty d AP I Tr Re Tu t y Tu ad or t ial or So s ial ur ce The First Year: Growth The First Month: Learning The First Day: Can this help me? Co nt Ex Ex rib pe pe ut r im r im e en en t t Watch the full process
- 11. Attrition Failure at any step costs your project another user. Your project is your own worst enemy.
- 12. The First Day “After spending less than 3 hours reading blog posts and perusing the documentation I was able to do a lot more in a lot less time then ever before. The huge community and neatly organized jQuery plugins make me feel like a sucker for not having jQuery for my pet-project.” http://aleembawany.com/2009/01/16/switching-from-prototype-to-jquery/
- 13. Homepage ✦ Set a good first impression ✦ Answer the questions: ✦ What is this? ✦ What can it do for me? ✦ Where can I go to learn more?
- 15. Getting Started Tutorial ✦ Clear, focused ✦ Assume no background knowledge
- 16. Download ✦ Make it super-easy, remove any barriers ✦ (We link straight to the source, no .zip)
- 17. Licensing ✦ Not a concern for some of people ✦ A huge concern for a lot of corporate users ✦ Use the most-open license possible ✦ Fewest number of restrictions gives you the largest possible market ✦ We use the MIT license for jQuery ✦ “Leave my name on the source file”
- 18. Try the Tutorial ✦ ...and subsequent Experimentation ✦ All about code quality ✦ For JavaScript libraries: Make sure your code is seamless across browsers ✦ For desktop apps: Is it truly cross- platform? Are there dependencies? ✦ The user should never be forced to ask for help in order to get started ✦ Asking for help “getting started” is a failure case on your end
- 19. Simplicity ✦ Simple APIs are king ✦ Users understand quicker ✦ Get started faster ✦ Become advanced quicker
- 20. The First Month “Alright I am now really really into jQuery. I used to hate javascript. WHAT HAS HAPPENED HERE? Javascript people, speak to me.” http://twitter.com/_ralph/status/1123503553
- 21. Community Resources ✦ Provide places for users to ask questions ✦ jQuery: ✦ jQuery Forum ✦ IRC Channel ✦ External: ✦ StackOverflow.com ✦ Twitter ✦ Blogs
- 22. Monitor Your Community ✦ Make sure that everyone is getting the help that they need ✦ We run an Evangelism Team “Developer Relations” ✦ Track all of the services they use ✦ Forum - Subscribe to the forums ✦ IRC - Sit in the IRC channel ✦ Blogs - Use Technorati and Google Blog Search ✦ Twitter - Use Twitter Search
- 23. Service Treat every user as a potential, future, contributor.
- 24. Service ✦ Today Mike Alsup and Michael Geary are part of the jQuery team
- 25. Twitter Tracking ✦ Track people talking about the code: ✦ http://search.twitter.com/ ✦ Look for people having trouble, asking questions
- 26. Answer Questions ✦ It takes a lot of time, but sometimes it’s really worth it ✦ You never know who could be having trouble
- 27. Follow-up With Large Users ✦ Maintain a list of contacts with your large users ✦ Ping them every once in a while ✦ Make sure that they’re having a good experience ✦ They frequently forget to file bugs - make sure that happens
- 28. API Documentation ✦ jQuery had API docs from the start (2006) ✦ Two other major libraries: Dojo, Prototype didn’t have any until 2007+ ✦ Clarity and usability of documentation is huge
- 29. API Example
- 31. Learn More ✦ Tutorials and Books ✦ Tutorials are short and drive home a point or single topic ✦ “Books” are more holistic and lead the reader from start to finish
- 32. Tutorials
- 33. The First Year
- 34. API Buy-in ✦ Once users start using an API for an application they generally stick with it ✦ Every new application is an opportunity to snag, or lose, a user ✦ All boils down to attrition: Did your user have a good experience building the first application?
- 35. Growth You need to give users some place to grow to.
- 36. Open Process ✦ Open Source is easy (just release the code and be done with it) ✦ Open Process is hard (open source control, easy bug tracking) ✦ A good process helps users learn
- 37. Core Development Process ✦ Weekly, public, team meetings ✦ Defined release dates and schedule ✦ Frequent discussion in #jquery-dev (IRC) ✦ Active participation of the committers and the bug triage team
- 39. Bug Triage Team ✦ Responsible for processing all the bugs in the bug tracker ✦ Make sure test cases are filed ✦ Work through pulls in the Github pull request queue ✦ Make sure the test suite is passing
- 40. Bugs
- 41. Roadmap Decisions ✦ Put up a public form for people to submit possible feature suggestions ✦ The team works through all the feature suggestions and creates a list ✦ All of this is done in a publicly and discussed in a public meeting
- 42. Roadmap
- 43. Extensibility ✦ Your API isn’t perfect - it can’t include everything for everyone ✦ Give users the ability to add their own functionality ✦ jQuery has a healthy plugin community with hundreds of plugins. ✦ Gives jQuery a huge leg up on other libraries.
- 44. Complex Applications ✦ Users will attempt to build increasingly complex applications ✦ Need to be there to help, otherwise they’ll leave for something else ✦ jQuery UI - A set of complex User Interface components.
- 45. jQuery UI
- 46. Contributions ✦ How does a user become a contributor? ✦ Encouragement is the biggest factor ✦ Encourage users to submit bug reports ✦ Encourage them to build test cases ✦ Encourage them to submit patches ✦ Praise them when something good is done. ✦ Communication is a huge factor here, “dead” bugs or mailing list threads cripple participation.
- 47. Overview ✦ Help your users at every step of the way ✦ Track them and help the stragglers ✦ Help them grow and flourish ✦ Questions? ✦ jeresig@gmail.com ✦ http://ejohn.org/ ✦ http://twitter.com/jeresig