No more open source loopback-gateway?

[Rob Mayhue]

When I read this StrongLoop blog post a while back: https://strongloop.com/strongblog/open-source-node-js-api-gateway/

I somehow came away with the impression that there was going to be 2 gateway versions:  LoopBack API Gateway (the open source version) & StrongLoop API Gateway (full featured commercial version).  When I read that blog post a while back I had planned on using the LoopBack API Gateway for some small projects but now today I see the github loopback-gateway repo now says "This module is now deprecated and superseded by StrongLoop API Gateway". 

At the risk of sounding unappreciative, which I'm not, why open source loopback-gateway and then pull the code from the repo and push to a licensed version?

I guess what I'm saying is... I didn't see that coming, and I'm a little disappointed and fearful that this could happen to loopback one day as well, after I've built some apps on loopback and put them into production.

Thoughts?  Will there ever be an open source version of the LoopBack API Gateway?  If not, maybe you should edit that blog post to reflect that fact.

Thanks.

[Shubhra Kar]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for reaching out. This has caused some heartburn to us. While Loopback was and is always intended to be an open source framework as has been the case since the past 2 years and has seen great adoption by the community and 46 connectors + SDKs... API Gateway was different.

We had put out an experimental (Labs) gateway project, which was more of a hard-coded example app. It was intended to seek feedback around use cases and was not really a configurable gateway or product. We did not see much collaboration or input from the community on it.

Keeping the hard-coded repo alive also means supporting it and it's a drain for a small startup like ours...particularly as it did not add any considerable value and wasn't widely adopted. Folks we reached out to asked for a Production ready product with robust configuration tooling and use cases like Federated Identity, JWT token, Policy management, API analytics, Proxy, API Portal, mediation, orchestration etc...which they expect from a solid Gateway. 

Hence the decision to deprecate it in favor of a robust product. In the short term, we don't envision an open source version of this. We did add the Gateway to our Standard plan to provide it a very low cost (fraction of commercial gateways) to Startups. Thanks for the heads up. We will update our blog from last year.

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Kind Regards,

Shubhra

 

Product Marketing Mgr. - StrongLoop