Timothy Tavarez's Blog

Restarting development of Nete

Timothy Tavarez -

Synopsis: Nete is an open source project of mine to connect public libraries to their patrons through mobile devices. I will begin development of Nete anew to take advantage of recent developments with Angular 2, Firebase and Angular Material.

I began development of Nete early this year, and then stopped development to work on other projects - but quite a bit happened in between.

  • Angular 2 edging much closer to release and picking up a lot of steam in the community. It is really fast, uses the truly idiomatic TypeScript and has an intuitive component system.

  • Firebase API underwent a major overhaul from v2 to v3! I've always been a fan of Firebase, but they really stepped it up. Firebase v3 supports analytics, device notifications, app indexing in Google Search/Now (this is a big deal), dynamic links and a ton of other cool stuff.

  • Angular Material v1 finally reached release! ... yet Angular Material 2 (supporting Angular 2) is already in alpha.

In all of these cases, there are either breaking changes or complete breaks from previous framework/API convention. I've been faced with the choice of how to get Nete to an alpha release while still orienting the source to be sufficiently prepared for migration to Angular 2 / Firebase v3, since Nete is based on the foundation of Angular, Firebase and Angular Material.

Over the last week, since I decided to open source Nete, I've been mulling it over and I've come to the conclusion that it would really just be a waste of effort. There is a ton of work to do to get Nete to alpha, and then I'll be climbing uphill to prepare the source code for upgrades. Additionally, I began Nete while it was still a closed source project, so I wasn't able to receive as much feedback as I'd like.

So why not begin anew? I'll start the project from scratch taking with me the lessons it taught me; using the progress on the current iteration of Nete as a prototype of sorts to show people what can be. This time around I'll leverage the community much more heavily and make it easy for others to get started working with, testing and contributing to Nete.