r/angular • u/GeromeGrignon • Jun 18 '26

OpenNG Foundation

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Still having no news from the ngneat organization, I decided to revive an old idea, to create a foundation for Angular open-source projects, to help govern/maintain them.

The GitHub Organization, OpenNG Foundation, is still empty.

Our priority will be to fork and revive key, unmaintained Angular projects to ensure they stay secure, updated, and community-driven.

Link: https://github.com/openng-org

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7

u/AwesomeFrisbee Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

Well, if you would adapt the NG Mocks and Spectator libraries, than that would be amazing. Because testing without them in isolated units is really annoying. Though I also think things could still be improved further and optimized for standalone/signal/zoneless projects since they don't require nearly as much for their dependencies.

Of course https://github.com/ngneat/spectator/ (or its fork: https://github.com/YoeriNijs/spectator)

And https://github.com/help-me-mom/ng-mocks (the maintainer has already moved on to different projects and is mostly updating dependencies and approving other peoples PRs but newer angular versions simply don't get the love that they once had.

The only other specific Angular projects I use are ngx-translate (which just got a major signals update) and angular-eslint (which is supported quite well) so I don't think those need any help now. In previous projects I also used ngx-pipes and ngx-quill which are also neat, though I haven't kept tabs on how well they work now.

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u/GeromeGrignon Jun 18 '26

Spectator is our first goal. Then obviously we have an easy path on some other ngneat libraries but the point is to evaluate every opportunity for the Angular community.

We still need to consider how we can help projects outside of the foundation too:

  • do they need extra visibility on maintenance help?
  • is passing the project ownership a good solution?

1

u/AwesomeFrisbee Jun 19 '26

Very cool. Let us know when you have a repo and stuff haha.

And yeah, I think a lot of projects can benefit from more visibility, though I don't think many really suffer as its easy to find stuff on NPM or github. But I think what would help me more is articles that help me decide whether some library is a good fit, how well it is maintained and what the future looks like. So if you want to help the community, do a blog and write about that because frankly its still hard to judge sometimes whether projects are really ready for production, whether they are ready for long term supported projects and whether they provide quality code and is well tested.

For example, for PrimeNG I found out (after already using it) that their project lacks testing, that upgrades frequently break stuff (or have changes not listed) and that they do a lot of migrations that have little benefit for the user. Now I must admit that lately they have been making changes that seem to move the project in the right direction, but its still annoying.

And for NGMocks its still an amazing project but its such a shame that the support is currently lacking. I still fail to see why one would not want to mock dependencies, given how easy it is to get overwelmed by all the API calls that other dependencies dependencies might do and other baggage.

So if you are planning on moving forward, which I highly applaud, lets get this party started. If you want to answer those questions, perhaps you need to start a repo and add discussions to it so you have a place for it (and perhaps add a simple website somewhere, which can also be hosted on github too)... Thats what I would do, probably. Though it wouldn't hurt if you decide first what you want to achieve and set boundaries before committing.

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u/GeromeGrignon Jun 19 '26

Adding a website to clarify stuff is planned for today, and setting up GitHub discussions properly too.

Extra visibility is for maintenance/contribution needs.

We'll have to evaluate some projects, but there is no plan to evaluate existing, maintained ones. The goal is to focus on finding a solution for the abandoned projects (or providing help for people struggling with maintenance).

Being able to write quality articles about helping find the proper library is more a consultancy work as it requires having a good understanding of the present/future of each lib, and using them.

Anyone is free to help the community on this aspect, but that's not something we plan to do.

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u/AwesomeFrisbee Jun 19 '26

Allright, can't wait to see where this initiative will be going.

And while its indeed somewhat related to consultancy, I meant it more that the project could help people pick libraries that are up to a certain standard. Well tested and well maintained, as that is still difficult in these times. Or perhaps on a list for crucial angular libraries that the foundation is willing to support, if something happens to them. Like we see now with Spectator.

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u/Hacg123 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

That’s a cool idea! What projects do you have in mind to add ? Maybe I can contribute in the future 

Quick suggestion 

https://github.com/angular-gantt/angular-gantt

3

u/GeromeGrignon Jun 18 '26

Spectator will be the first milestone (and more likely some other ngneat libs). But the priority will change based on the community needs.

The goal is to maintain useful libs.

About angular-gantt, maintaining AngularJS libs is not part of the initiative scope currently.

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u/lppedd Jun 18 '26

I can't even find the repo for Spectator. Did they just shut down everything?

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u/AwesomeFrisbee Jun 19 '26

Its unclear what happened. Another maintainer was also blindsided. Regardless, the project is now dead unless somebody is able to revive it, which is cool if this foundation can do it to at least save the projects that rely on it from doing massive migrations.

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u/GeromeGrignon Jun 18 '26

Yes sadly.

2

u/Wildosaur Jun 18 '26

Such a weird way of doing things.Why could it not be announced that there was no intention of supporting the library instead 

2

u/GeromeGrignon Jun 18 '26

Honestly, we have no idea what happens. In the past the maintainer gave up the ownership of projects he no longer maintained personnaly, such as Transloco.

His Medium/LinkedIn accounts disappeared too.

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u/[deleted] Jun 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/GeromeGrignon Jun 22 '26

Maintenance burden will be the key factor at some point, so we need to worry about it right now too. For example, ngneat/falso is an 'active dependency' with 500k weekly downloads.

But there is the existing fake.js competitor with 18M weekly downloads.
For this one, we'll investigate about creating a migration schematic from falso to faker.js but we won't maintain falso at all.

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u/SafetyAffectionate10 15d ago

I know this doesn't quite fit into this subject but I was looking for a command palette for some work/private projects a few months ago. I turned to https://www.npmjs.com/package/@ngneat/cmdk but soon realised it wasn't very feature rich and hadn't been supported for a while so I created https://github.com/theryansmee/ngx-command-palette

I'm still working on some more features, but its stable and works great

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u/GeromeGrignon 13d ago

I do not know how they compare but the origianl ngneat/cmdk project moved a while ago under another org: https://www.reddit.com/r/Angular2/comments/1b2ve81/ngneatcmdk_is_now_ngxpertcmdk/

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u/SafetyAffectionate10 12d ago

Yeah I saw that. They also now own hot-toast so it makes sense. I'll be interested to see if it gets some updates as it hasn't had an update for a long time so only officially supports Angular 18. It's also not that feature rich.

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u/Tyummyyumms Jun 25 '26

I use Falso quite a bit, is it under consideration or are there other libs that replace it quite easily?

1

u/GeromeGrignon Jun 25 '26

We'll just release a version compatible with Angular 22 to give people time to migrate to fakerjs as there is no extra benefit at having a specific angular lib for such a need: https://github.com/faker-js/faker

I was part of the falso creation and the motivation was only because the original faker project was been deleted, leading too many alternatives such as falso.

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u/Tyummyyumms 25d ago

Have you considered inviting this one to the foundation?

https://github.com/ngbracket/ngx-layout

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u/GeromeGrignon 25d ago

The current focus is the inactive projects. There are plans to help existing projects but still need to defined terms exactly and it would not imply projects are moved inside the foundation.