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LoopBack - 2020 Goals and Focus

· 4 min read
Diana Lau
Raymond Feng
Miroslav Bajtoš

Originally published on strongloop.com

2019 was surely an exciting and rewarding year for LoopBack. We received the "Best in API Middleware" award from API World, our LB4 downloads on npmjs.com increased more than double compared to the year before. Moreover, we are thrilled to learn that many of you had deployed LoopBack 4 applications in production! In case you missed our 2019 review, make sure you check it out. As 2020 begins, we would like to share with you our high-level goals for this year. Things might change or shift throughout the year, but here is our plan.

Goal#1 - Enable as many LoopBack 3 users to migrate to LoopBack 4 as possible​

With LoopBack 3 going end-of-life at the end of 2020, we are continuing to focus on the following areas:

  • Migration Guide

    We had made good progress in the general runtime migration guide. As we complete the spike for the migration guide on authentication and authorization, we aim at finishing the migration guide in both areas. Our approach is to create the skeleton of the migration guide and fill in the details as we go. If you'd like to see certain migration topics but they are not in the guide, please let us know!

  • Migration tooling

    To allow you to migrate your LB3 app incrementally, we have an example for you to demonstrate how to mount your existing LoopBack 3 (LB3) application on a new LoopBack 4 (LB4) project and how to move the middleware from the LB3 application to a common location so that both the LB3 and LB4 applications can use them. Besides, there is also a CLI to import models from LoopBack 3 project.

    We would like to continue to add and enhance the migration tooling to make your migration experience easier and faster.

  • Feature parity

    This year, we would like to close some of the feature parity gaps that a lot of you are asking for. We also realized that there are existing libraries to support certain functionalities in some cases, we'd like to document our recommendation as well.

  • Integration into IBM API Connect

    With LoopBack 3 being packaged in IBM API Connect, it is also a good time for us to have LoopBack 4 integrated into the product. A spike has been done on the integration work and we'll continue to work on this.

Goal#2 - Keep adopting latest technologies to stay relevant​

While enhancing our core code base, we'd like to continue to explore the possibility of using and/or integrating the latest technologies with LoopBack 4, such as:

  • messaging and pub/sub event style, e.g. Kafka, MQTT
  • cloud native integration
  • native support on GraphQL
  • modernize the connector infrastructure and code base

We initiated some investigation in some of the areas last year and would like to continue to adopting the latest technologies in order for LoopBack to stay relevant.

Goal#3: Nurture our community and encourage more contributions​

We cannot do this alone! Community contributions are vital to us. As our user base gets larger, it is essential to grow the contributor community. It not only accelerates our development, but also helps the community gain deeper LoopBack knowledge.

We would like to encourage community contributions by making a list of GH issues available to the community that we want to finish in the short term by using the help wanted and 2020Qx labels. If you're looking for something to contribute in LoopBack, please check our issue list for 2020Q1.

If you're new to contributing to LoopBack or in open source project in general, don't worry, we have detailed instructions to guide you through.

Call to Action​

In 2020, we look forward to helping you and seeing you around! LoopBack's success depends on you. We appreciate your continuous support and engagement to make LoopBack even better and meaningful for your API creation experience. Here's how you can join us and help the project: