2016: a year of radical change for the CUBA platform
This article is a traditional post summing up the past year. And also the story that even a good product needs to be able to sell correctly.
Of course, the main event of the year for us is the transition to open source. This has led to an explosive growth of the community and - paradoxically - sales. Under the cut, I will talk about the causes and results of this step, and in addition I will review the main innovations from a technical point of view.
Active projects on the CUBA platform
Disclaimer: if you are not familiar with the CUBA platform, I recommend reading this post .
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So, the old license was similar to the 1C model: the cost depended on the number of installed applications and simultaneous users. However, what works for 1C due to the de facto monopolistic position on the market has not been applied to the new product. The developers tried the platform and even left positive feedback, but almost no one dared to develop industrial applications.
We assumed that the main reason was the restrictions on the distribution of applications created on the platform, and eventually decided to move to open source. Not without hesitation: giving away for free what was spent dozens of person-years of development, knowing that there will be no way back is quite exciting.
New licensing policy entered into force in April. From now on, the platform is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. In addition, we left some additional components paid, such as the report generator and CUBA Studio, a visual tool that accelerates the development of applications on the platform. For this paid part, the license also changed and became attached to the developer. As a result, all restrictions on the distribution of applications have been removed.
The result was not long in coming. Already in April, sales exceeded the result of the entire previous year. By the end of the year, we had commercial clients in 33 countries — Germany, the USA and Russia were among the leaders. This gives us confidence that we will have enough resources for the active development of the platform.
The same growth occurred with the developer community. We collect anonymous statistics on the use of the platform from users who agree to provide it. According to her, at the end of the year at the same time more than 800 projects were developed at CUBA - this is 6-fold growth in a year! The number of forum posts increased from one or two to 20-30 per day. To support the community, we launched regular webinars and trainings, opened a dedicated chat room in Gitter.
Growth in the number of projects by months
In the technical part, based on requests from the community, we focused on expanding the possibilities of using the platform in various scenarios. In short, to make it more flexible, more open, more scalable. Here are the most significant changes over the past year:
Generate an application based on an existing database . Built-in Studio tool creates a data model and generates an interface for it without changing the database structure. This greatly reduces the effort to migrate legacy applications to the platform.
Integration with Jelastic cloud. Now you can applet Jelastic in one click directly from Studio. Added deployment instructions to other clouds.
Embedding third-party visual components. If you do not have enough standard components of the platform - you can connect Vaadin, GWT or arbitrary JavaScript components.
Support for multiple data stores. One of the most popular features - the application on the platform, including the standard UI, can now work with several databases simultaneously.
Components of the application. The mechanism allows you to break a monolithic application into independent functional modules, developing them as separate projects. Such modules can be deployed individually or within a single application, they will most likely have their own UI, data model and business logic - according to the concept of Self Contained Systems .
The new REST API fully supports the principles of REST using URI, HTTP verbs and OAuth2.
Besides these major, there were many other improvements in releases 6.1 , 6.2 and 6.3 . And in February 2017 release 6.4 will be released, in which customer support will appear on Polymer.
Of course, despite the growth, in absolute numbers the developer community on the platform is still small. In fact, we are at the very beginning. But we look to the future with optimism and we hope more often to please developers with new features!
Of course, the main event of the year for us is the transition to open source. This has led to an explosive growth of the community and - paradoxically - sales. Under the cut, I will talk about the causes and results of this step, and in addition I will review the main innovations from a technical point of view.
Active projects on the CUBA platform
Disclaimer: if you are not familiar with the CUBA platform, I recommend reading this post .
')
So, the old license was similar to the 1C model: the cost depended on the number of installed applications and simultaneous users. However, what works for 1C due to the de facto monopolistic position on the market has not been applied to the new product. The developers tried the platform and even left positive feedback, but almost no one dared to develop industrial applications.
We assumed that the main reason was the restrictions on the distribution of applications created on the platform, and eventually decided to move to open source. Not without hesitation: giving away for free what was spent dozens of person-years of development, knowing that there will be no way back is quite exciting.
New licensing policy entered into force in April. From now on, the platform is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. In addition, we left some additional components paid, such as the report generator and CUBA Studio, a visual tool that accelerates the development of applications on the platform. For this paid part, the license also changed and became attached to the developer. As a result, all restrictions on the distribution of applications have been removed.
The result was not long in coming. Already in April, sales exceeded the result of the entire previous year. By the end of the year, we had commercial clients in 33 countries — Germany, the USA and Russia were among the leaders. This gives us confidence that we will have enough resources for the active development of the platform.
The same growth occurred with the developer community. We collect anonymous statistics on the use of the platform from users who agree to provide it. According to her, at the end of the year at the same time more than 800 projects were developed at CUBA - this is 6-fold growth in a year! The number of forum posts increased from one or two to 20-30 per day. To support the community, we launched regular webinars and trainings, opened a dedicated chat room in Gitter.
Growth in the number of projects by months
In the technical part, based on requests from the community, we focused on expanding the possibilities of using the platform in various scenarios. In short, to make it more flexible, more open, more scalable. Here are the most significant changes over the past year:
Generate an application based on an existing database . Built-in Studio tool creates a data model and generates an interface for it without changing the database structure. This greatly reduces the effort to migrate legacy applications to the platform.
Integration with Jelastic cloud. Now you can applet Jelastic in one click directly from Studio. Added deployment instructions to other clouds.
Embedding third-party visual components. If you do not have enough standard components of the platform - you can connect Vaadin, GWT or arbitrary JavaScript components.
Support for multiple data stores. One of the most popular features - the application on the platform, including the standard UI, can now work with several databases simultaneously.
Components of the application. The mechanism allows you to break a monolithic application into independent functional modules, developing them as separate projects. Such modules can be deployed individually or within a single application, they will most likely have their own UI, data model and business logic - according to the concept of Self Contained Systems .
The new REST API fully supports the principles of REST using URI, HTTP verbs and OAuth2.
Besides these major, there were many other improvements in releases 6.1 , 6.2 and 6.3 . And in February 2017 release 6.4 will be released, in which customer support will appear on Polymer.
Of course, despite the growth, in absolute numbers the developer community on the platform is still small. In fact, we are at the very beginning. But we look to the future with optimism and we hope more often to please developers with new features!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/319278/
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