LeaferJS Launches Community: Become Globally Popular Like Vue, Benefiting 10M+ Developers

2024-11-20 "Blossoming Joy"

Hi everyone, I’m Wan Chao (Leafer), the creator of the LeaferJS open-source engine. Recently, the return story of Li Ziqi touched countless people, and it also made me reflect on my own persistence and struggles over the past three years. Today, I’d like to take this opportunity to share an open-source story about dreams and effort, and sincerely invite anyone interested to join us in writing the next chapter of this journey.

The Beginning of a Dream

Three years ago, under the late-night light illuminating my desk, with the quiet night sky outside, as an independent developer who had continuously built multiple products, I could no longer tolerate one thing: why do I have to reimplement the UI with code after finishing designing a product interface? This process was tedious and time-consuming, and even worse, it would easily become laggy when the content grew.

So I asked myself: can I build a high-performance, flexible graphics engine along with supporting design and development tools, so that every developer can build their products faster? This idea ignited my passion and started a long journey.

The Journey from 0 to 1

With this vision, I began developing the LeaferJS engine. From architecture design to feature implementation, I kept learning and improving, treating every step like crafting a piece of art.

Days passed into nights, stars lit my path forward. With no funding and no team, the level of difficulty was beyond imagination. Year after year, I endured all the loneliness and pressure, holding onto one belief: I must turn this dream into reality.

Three years later, perseverance paid off. LeaferJS 1.0 was finally polished and mature. It gained recognition from a wide range of users, and its applicable scenarios far exceeded my expectations. A steady stream of developers joined the community, contributing products, games, plugins, and tutorials.

• There are currently 5 technical discussion groups, gathering developers from various industries;
• Hundreds of thousands of users have already used LeaferJS;
• We have started collaborating with large enterprises to host AI programming competitions (game-focused);

Since I’ve been busy with development and did little promotion, many users found us only after great effort. Some even regretted their previous technology choices, and many users voluntarily recommended it to others. I believe it is now ready for large-scale adoption.

Launching the Community: Becoming Globally Popular Like Vue

As the user base grows, I gradually realized: one person alone can no longer support the entire ecosystem.

Beginners want simple scenario-based tutorials to get started quickly, while advanced users expect more professional plugins and frameworks. These demands call for a more open and active community.

Therefore, I decided:

• Officially launch LeaferJS community development, enabling developers worldwide to participate;
• Collect free/paid tutorials, plugins, and frameworks to integrate more real-world scenarios and make it easier for more people to use;
• Promote LeaferJS to become as popular as Vue, benefiting over 10 million developers.

In addition, we need to build a developer marketplace and demand center, where excellent products, tutorials, components, and plugins can reach those who need them, enabling efficient flow of productivity. This allows everyone to focus on their strengths, collaborate, and generate value together.

This is an ambitious goal, but I believe that as long as we unite, we can achieve it. We have formulated detailed plans and steps, and will organize participants to complete tasks progressively. You can visit the official website for more details.

A Shared Community

When we choose open source, LeaferJS no longer belongs to a single person, but becomes a shared community for all of us.

When you choose to use LeaferJS, you also become a member of this vibrant community, stepping into a “technical castle” under construction. Only through the passionate participation and contributions of every member can this castle gradually be perfected. Every contribution you make plants a seed for gaining richer community resources in return.

Mission and Vision: Laying the Foundation for Future AI and Web

Our goal is not only to make it a cutting-edge 2D and future 3D engine, but also to deliver an exceptional development experience. We aim to help developers quickly build visual productivity tools for the AI era, including web apps, applications, design tools, canvases, games, and animations (such as next-generation local-first Figma, Miro, Notion, Unity, Adobe, Canva, Webflow).

This is a long yet enjoyable journey, and we are steadily moving toward this goal year after year.

Culture of Excellence: Balance Between Life and Work

We aim to gradually build a team and community culture like this:

Sincere and resilient, pursuing excellence, loving life, being unique, listening, helping each other, knowing priorities, not fearing failure, and being result-oriented

We believe that when a person is physically and mentally strong and full of curiosity about the world, they generate endless vitality and creativity. Therefore, we encourage both the pursuit of excellence and the love of life.

We strive to climb peaks that no one has reached before, while also understanding our limits, focusing our intelligence on what we are most passionate about and what brings the most value to users—creating things that have never been done before.

We know success doesn’t happen overnight, so we embrace failures along the way, even occasional rest, as long as we maintain resilience and never give up. By learning from failures, growing continuously, and accumulating small victories, we will eventually reach our destination.

We hope to build a new type of internet company and community like Pangdonglai, and if you resonate with this culture, you are welcome to join us.

Top-Level Performance Goals

Achieve smooth performance with 100,000+ dynamic complex game elements, while supporting editing of 1,000,000+ static complex elements (GPU acceleration).

Currently, no company in the world has achieved such a technological breakthrough (over 10x performance improvement). To move toward this goal, we will introduce commercial acceleration solutions for specialized scenarios, providing dedicated support for developers who need extreme performance. At the same time, these breakthroughs will gradually benefit the free version, allowing all users to enjoy the improvements.

To give everyone a sense of the upcoming performance, we provide a canvas capable of holding one million cups of coffee, allowing smooth interaction and editing. There is still room for improvement, and we will continue optimizing.

Sponsor Us: Get One-on-One Support

To achieve these goals, LeaferJS needs community participants, top talent, and stable financial support. If your company wants to build a strong brand, achieve industry-leading performance, or develop professional software based on LeaferJS, consider becoming our sponsor.

We offer flexible and creative sponsorship plans, ranging from exclusive sponsorship at 100,000/month to enterprise sponsorship at 1,000/month, covering companies of different scales. As a sponsor, you will gain limited one-on-one technical support opportunities, as well as priority access to the latest technologies and in-depth communication.

In addition, if you successfully persuade your company to become a sponsor, you will be featured on the community contribution wall and receive special community rewards.

Here are the companies and individuals who have supported us—thank you:

The Capital Decision: Accelerate or Move Steadily?

Recently, an investor who has been observing our community for two years expressed interest in investing, seeing that LeaferJS is gradually getting on track. He believes that LeaferJS needs hundreds of millions in funding to better realize the vision I have planned. This is undoubtedly a major opportunity for growth, but at the same time, I am carefully considering whether introducing capital before forming the ideal team and achieving healthy cash flow would affect our pace and open-source principles.

After discussions with the investor, I prefer to introduce capital only after establishing a stable core team and community foundation, ensuring that LeaferJS’s long-term development stays aligned with its open-source mission and avoids risks from rapid expansion.

Let’s Take Action Together First!

For LeaferJS to achieve large-scale adoption, we must start with education. We need more user stories, scenario-based tutorials, and professional courses, so that users can quickly understand what products they can build, what problems can be solved, how to use it, and how to go from 0 to 1 in building something they’ve never done before.

Next are plugins and frameworks. Many features of our product can be turned into reusable plugins and frameworks, saving time collectively and allowing us to focus more on business and monetization.

Many users have told me more than once that they are willing to pay for advanced tutorials to learn faster and purchase plugins that solve problems to save time. LeaferJS is opening up a new blue ocean market for everyone—let’s take action together!

🔥 Tutorial Plan: Recruiting 1,000 Creators

Together, we aim to produce 10,000 practical articles and tutorials, and 20 paid hands-on courses.

You can start from the following aspects:

• Share your story with LeaferJS—what needs led you to use it? How did you discover it? What was your experience?

• What features of LeaferJS do you find useful? These can be written as scenario-based tutorials.

• What areas do you think need more examples? These can also be written as tutorials.

Hands-on courses:

• 《Build a Game from 0 to 1》

• 《Build a Graphic Editor / Image Cropping Tool / Video Editing Software from 0 to 1》

• 《Build a ... from 0 to 1》

This is just the first step. Next will come video tutorials and documentation translations, gradually bringing LeaferJS from domestic to global.

Every participant will be featured on the community contribution wall, and a dedicated column will collect all contributions. Feel free to contact me and join the discussion groups.

Plugin Plan: Recruiting 100 Developers

Together, we aim to produce 100 plugins for drawing, games, and graphic editing scenarios, and 20 high-quality paid plugins:

• Figma import/export plugin (already under development)

• SVG import/export plugin, PDF export plugin

• Alignment and snapping plugin (already under development)

• Grid plugin (already under development)

• Native canvas rich text plugin, connection line plugin ...

This is just the first step. Next will include frameworks, products, and competitions, building a mutually beneficial ecosystem together.

Every participant will be featured on the community contribution wall, and a dedicated column will collect all contributions. Feel free to contact me and join the discussion groups.

Request Collection

Feel free to write in the comments what tutorials, plugins, or frameworks you want.

We will collect them and place them into a task list for participants to claim and for everyone to track.

Visit the official website for more details: www.leaferjs.com

Media Sharing

Web Frontend Insight - Official Account

Share with Friends