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Express Gateway Roadmap Overview

Fast, Flexible and Community Driven. When we say community driven - it’s not a tagline, it’s a commitment. Given its use case, There are so many features that could be built for Express Gateway, the big question is - what first?

Community Driven - What it Means

Fast, Flexible and Community Driven. When we say community driven - it’s not a tagline, it’s a commitment. Given its use case, There are so many features that could be built for Express Gateway, the big question is - what first? As developers and technical practitioners, we’re firm believers in building what the developer community actually needs not what we or anyone thinks they want.

There’s a big key difference between the two.

One approach is driven by marketing fluff, opinion and hearsay. The other approach is backed by tangible use cases, eye opening developer experiences and a sincere desire to put the functionality to use. If you couldn’t already tell, we’ve worked hard to create an open source project worth contributing to. As an open source API Gateway built entirely on Express.js, our roots celebrate open source every step of the way.

Timelines for Features

Thanks for all of the Node.js and Express.js developers who have already engaged in the critical feature development and feedback process. So, we have divdied the Express Gateway roadmap by features along the timeframe. If you’d like to take a look, please keep in mind that features and functionality currently being considered will show up in greater detail.

Think of it like eyesight.

The closer something is to you - the more detail. As things get father out - they become smaller and out of focus.So, this basically begs the question - how are work and features prioritized and given their designated timeframes?

The answer is simple - based on commmunity driven need and ongoing feedback.

Roadmap and Express Gateway Development - How it Works

The Express Roadmap is outlined on the Roadmap page. We’ve done our best to articulate important features shared with us by the community. This is a living document and if you’re interested in taking a lead role, we’re looking for maintainers right now.

Next, it’s time to get to work! So, larger feature sets for the next release are taken from the roadmap put into the “Backlog” column on the GitHub project. Then, contributors build out epics to describe the feature with multiple user stories that can be work on in iterative chunks. Additionally, epics are prefixed with a descriptor at the beginning of their title, for example - “Clustering:”. This makes it easy to filter the GitHub project while not having to create a Github label for every epic being worked on. Also, it frees up the Github milestone to be able to group user stories into a Release.

Once the epic is articulated, prioritized items in the “Backlog” move on over into the “In Progress” column. Then, the magic happens!

Introducing Express Gateway Feathub

As we began focusing on a more in depth developer experience, it was getting harder to track community need and feedback. So we looked for a better solution and we landed on Feathub. Feathub is exactly what we’ve seen happening in the wild with Github by +1’ing issues that describe new features or enhancements.

So what is it?

FeatHub is a feature voting platform consolidated to a simple interface to make it easier to upvote your favorites. You can now enter in features and enhnacements on the Express Gateway Feathub.

Using Feathub, we can listen more closely to develoeprs, like you, and be more inclusive of everyone in the Developer Community. The best and brightest features will get added to the Express Gateway Roadmap. Check it out!

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