RethinkDB is shutting down. Today the RethinkDB team bid a fond farewell to its open source, scalable JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) database built for the real-time web.

The news, announced on the project’s developer blog, is bittersweet and comes with a lesson-learned attitude about the failure of the project. “We worked very hard to make RethinkDB successful, but in spite of all our efforts we were ultimately unable to build a sustainable business,” wrote Slava Akhmechet. “There is a lot of information to unpack – over the next few months, I’ll write about lessons learned so the startup community can benefit from our mistakes.”

For web applications, JSON is used as a human-readable data protocol that makes it easier for Javascript applications to communicate between web browsers, mobile devices and servers. RealthinkDB capitalized on this communication method by providing a new type of database access protocol that had the database telling applications each time it was changed instead of the traditional method of querying the database periodically. This push-notification system allows for rapid updating of apps that need to display changes in data in realtime.

Production of RethinkDB started in July 2009 written in C++, JavaScript and Bash. It is released under the AGPL open-source license. The last stable release was version 2.3.2 on May 2, 2016.

The software is used by hundreds of technology startups, consulting firms and even Fortune 500 companies and boasts a developer community of over 100,000 contributors. Examples of companies who use RethinkDB include collaboration platform Jive Software, the remote video website Pristine.io, the educational livestreaming company Platzi and Minecraft mass-scale host NodeCraft.

What this shutdown means for developers

Because RethinkDB is an open-source project, it will never truly go away. All that happens is the lead developers will slow down development and stop maintaining the major branch. However, the RethinkDB team wants to make sure that the open-source project lives on beyond the company’s shutdown.

“We’d like your help to ensure RethinkDB’s future as an open-source project! We don’t have all of the details figured out, but we wanted to be as open as possible during this process. If you’re interested in contributing, please join us in the #open-rethinkdb channel of our public Slack group. You can expect to see development slow down in the meantime, but everything will continue to be available on rethinkdb.com and horizon.io. We will post updates on our blog and Twitter as we continue working things out.”

The last commit to the RethinkDB GitHub repository is also bittersweet one: “danielmewes committed on GitHub Removed production support link from README :(“

What this means for the RethinkDB team

The RethinkDB team is moving house with the shutdown of the company and the engineering team is expected to join Stripe Inc., a fully-fledged software platform and toolkit for online payments.

Stripe has also committed to assisting the RethinkDB team establish a sustainable future for the software suite as an independent open-source project.

Featured image credit: Roberto.Trombetta hong kong via photopin (license)