Announcing the Sunsetting of Aqueduct – Our Open-Source, Server-Side Framework in Google’s Dart
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Joe Conway
Last Update: March 29, 2021
We see the news regarding sunsetting Aqueduct has created conversations around the future of the product and what that looks like for your own projects. We are thrilled that so many of you feel passionate about Aqueduct and want to jump in and help it continue on.
We wanted to reach out to share that unfortunately, we won’t be able to grant access to any of the digital properties associated with Aqueduct. This includes:
- Aqueduct slack channel
- Aqueduct package in pub
- The aqueduct.io domain
Over the years, we have built an incredible amount of trust within the Dart community, and we take data privacy and package management very seriously. First, our users have given us consent to obtain their data, and sharing that data with a third-party would be violating data privacy best practices we believe strongly in at Stable Kernel.
Second, our users have trusted the Aqueduct package to be a secure dependency that doesn’t install malware, share data from their work, or cause intentional harm. For that to be verifiably true, we cannot provide access to the pub package.
Though we are hopeful the community can continue with Aqueduct, the safety and privacy of our users and their data is of the highest priority. Thank you all for your continued support and please reach out if you have any further questions.
I’m Joe Conway, CEO of Stable Kernel and creator of Aqueduct, our open-source, server-side framework that we’ve had the pleasure of supporting for the last several years. We’re writing this to let our community know that we’ve made the difficult decision to no longer support Aqueduct.
Though Aqueduct started as a framework that would help Stable Kernel engineers better serve our clients and the innovative software we build for them, it became a framework that many of you supported, contributed to, and were excited about. We couldn’t be more grateful.
At Stable Kernel, we rely on the Trust Triangle methodology to help us make decisions that impact our company both day-to-day and long-term. When making the difficult decision to no longer support Aqueduct, we turned to the Trust Triangle and its components for guidance: Competence, Benevolence and Reliability.
Competence: The intention has always been to make Aqueduct a well-documented, well-tested framework. Our partnership with Google’s Dart team, the support from our internal engineering team, and the contributions from you in the Dart community have made this possible.
Benevolence: We thought about and built Aqueduct with the developer experience in mind, and we believe we did a great job at accomplishing that.
Reliability: In order for Aqueduct to be reliable, we would need to provide ongoing maintenance and support. As we are shifting to serve our clients in different ways, we can no longer commit to the level of excellence that we expect and the Dart community deserves.
As Stable Kernel evolves, we’re continuing to focus on new and exciting ways to best solve our clients’ business problems while also giving our engineers interesting technologies to delve into. The open-source community continues to be important to us, and we look forward to making a more sustainable, long-term impact.
How Aqueduct sunsetting might impact your work:
- We will keep the Aqueduct slack group active until September and, in the meantime, we welcome any new members to join
- We will keep the Aqueduct website live, including docs and guidelines up for your reference
- We will continue to host the source code in Github for anyone to fork
- Aqueduct is now closed for contributions
- We recognize that over time, the gap between Aqueduct and Dart will continue to widen, and we recommend migrating your projects to a different platform. We’re seeing promising things in the Kotlin/Springboot community.
We also want to extend our gratitude to the Google Dart team for being an amazing partner throughout this journey, and we can’t wait to see how Dart continues to evolve and positively impact the future of tech.
We would be thrilled to continue a dialogue with you, so here are a few ways you can keep in touch with Stable Kernel.
- If you’re looking to make a long-term impact, drive innovation and be a part of a team of builders, sign up for our talent pool – you’ll be the first to know when future engineering positions at Stable Kernel go live throughout the year. We’ll also periodically reach out with company and industry news.
- Feel free to shoot me a connection on LinkedIn – I’d love to keep in touch.
We again want to thank each and every one of you in this community for your ongoing support. We are forever grateful to you.
