toddle is soon open-source

Reinventing a paradigm does not mean that you have to reject every idea that came before. Creativity and innovation are not a single track; they are a combination of ideas. There are many great things about the web platform, and toddle is very much the culmination of that. The most powerful thing about the web is that it is open. No one company or country controls it. It belongs to everyone. The software and technologies on which the web is built are also open and can be freely read, copied, and used by anyone. 

Open-source software is a beautiful thing. It is at the heart of every computer system you interact with daily. The server that rendered this page, the phone or laptop you currently stare at, and the browser you use to read it are all powered by open-source software. 

All these things are possible because many people choose to share their work with the world free of charge or with copyright. Without open-source software, the web would not exist.  

If we want to change how software is built for the web, it’s our duty to make it accessible, and I am happy to announce that from July 2024, we will start the work to make toddle open-source.

Why does this matter?

If you're curious about the benefits of open-source, Supabase's article is a must-read. 

Supabase inspires us and makes us realize that the only way we can achieve our goal is to go open-source. 

It is your app!

No matter if your project is a fun side hustle or the next unicorn B2B SaaS platform. If you built it, you should control the rights. We choose open-source, but what’s the point of intellectual property if you can’t decide where your application lives and who you want to host it? If your app is locked to a specific platform and vendor, do you really own it?

Freedom of movement is crucial to any serious developer. If we can’t provide that freedom, few will build, and we won’t be able to change how software is built for the web.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

t oddle is a small team of experienced engineers and designers. The team has adopted the new paradigm; it allowed us to build the most powerful and scalable visual programming platform on the market incredibly fast. 

But if you want to change the world, even the best team will not suffice. We need a village.

The most fantastic thing about toddle is the incredible community that has formed around it. Experienced users spend hours and hours a week with newcomers in our discord channel. They create videos and tutorials to help toddle beginners. They also provide invaluable feedback and feature suggestions to our team. 

In February, we launched our new package repository, which lets anyone create powerful packages for toddle. Since then, people have built UI libraries, Drag-and-Drop toolkits, and much more. The community needed this functionality, and to save others time, they published them as packages that are open source and free to use.

The community makes toddle possible and drives many fantastic features we shipped this year.

We take toddle open source to thank you and show that toddle belongs to all of us.

It’s an opportunity for our community members to contribute to their favorite platform and help improve toddle. Since toddle is built in toddle, most of the community already knows how.

Come for the freedom. Stay because you want to.

We want our users and customers to choose toddle because it is the best tool for the job, not because they are locked to our platform. By making the editor and runtime open source, we effectively let go of any vendor lock-in to our hosting platform. This means that you can build and run your toddle application entirely without toddle’s hosting platform, and it will not cost you a dime.

This gives us a strong incentive to ensure that toddle’s hosting platform is the best place to host your toddle application and gives you the right to choose.

The grand plan

It will take a lot of work to make this happen. Our engineers will go through all our code repositories and extract the open-source code from the code in the hosting platform. This means we will release the different parts in stages:

Phase 1: Enable self-hosting

First, we will release runtime libraries for toddle applications. This enables anyone to host their own toddle application anywhere. It will also allow anyone to build servers that serve toddle apps or add that feature to an existing node server.

Then, we will release the language specification for the toddle programming language. This allows third-party developers to build software that targets toddle. E.g. a toddle to React compiler, etc.

Phase 2: Run your own toddle 

In the second phase, we will release the toddle editor. This will allow users to both build and run their toddle applications without toddle’s hosting platform.

The first step is to make the toddle editor and documentation projects public so we can accept contributions from the community.

The last step is to release the editor backend and a simple setup to run toddle independently.

The future is brighter than ever.

We are super excited to take toddle open-source and share it with the world! I want to thank all our extraordinary community members for their support until now. You are indeed what makes toddle great!