As Twitter faces criticism for controversial changes to its API, it is celebrating the one-year birthday of Bootstrap, its open source front-end framework for web development, with the release of version 2.1 with simplified documentation and fixes to more than 100 issues.
Mark Otto, one of the designers in charge of Bootstrap, said in an official blog post that his team “focused on simplicity” for the update. The project also received a “handful of new features” and improvements to existing ones.
Within months of last year’s initial release, Bootstrap became the most popular repository on coding service GitHub. It remains the most popular starred and second-most popular forked project on the site, as of August 20.
“Bootstrap wouldn’t be the success it is today without a lot of love and support from the development and open source communities,” Otto wrote, adding that more than 100 people have contributed code to the framework.
Twitter says its service is “built on open source software from the back-end to the front-end”. Earlier this year, it released Cassie, a client for Cassandra, to the community, and some of the software from Whisper Systems, an Android security developer that it acquired.
The company has also partnered up with GitHub on the open source TwUI interface framework that powers the official Twitter for Mac app.
While Twitter may have built up goodwill with developers by way of its participation in open source, poorly-communicated changes to its API have threatened to squander it. On its way to a billion users, the service has been accused of casting aside third-party developers, especially those building Twitter clients.
Not all have chafed at the new API, though. For instance, Tweetbot’s developers responded by telling people not to panic, as the rules might not be as restrictive as some have assumed.
Image credit: Eldh
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