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jQuery Open Source Process (RIT 2011)
This document summarizes the key aspects of jQuery's open source process that contributed to its early success. In the first month, new users were able to get started quickly by exploring the simple API through tutorials. An active community provided support through forums, IRC, blogs and Twitter. Documentation and examples helped users learn and expand their skills. Over the first year, as users built more applications with jQuery, its easy to use but powerful API led to increased adoption. The open development process also engaged users and helped the project grow.
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jQuery Open Source Process (RIT 2011)
- 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 AreImportant ✦ Technical ✦ API Design (Usability, documentation) ✦ Code Quality (Licensing, openness, test coverage) ✦ Non-technical ✦ Community (Resources, responsiveness) ✦ Learning Aides (Tutorials, books, demos)
- 9. What it allboils 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 anystep 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 “AlrightI 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 useras 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 LargeUsers ✦ 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
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- 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
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- 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 togive 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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.
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- 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