Oct 17, 2025
By Stephanie Simone
Harper announced it will open source its core technology, a composable full-stack web application platform—aiming to support wider Node.js developer adoption of its platform, drive innovation at the edge, and foster a more open ecosystem of community contribution.
According to the company, the highly extensible, distributed system fuses database, cache, messaging, andNode.js runtimeinto a single server-side process—delivering unmatched performance for data-intensive, latency-sensitive applications.
This open-source release marks a significant milestone in Harper’s strategy to drive innovation through openness, the company said. Harper hopes to accelerate the development of new use cases in edge computing and distributed web applications, leveraging community-driven ideas and feedback.
Harper will continue to offer enterprise-grade support and managed services for organizations that require production assistance, ensuring that both OpenJScommunity users and enterprise customers benefit from Harper’s ongoing evolution.
Harper’sdecision to open source its foundational technology comes as the composable platform has already seen strong enterprise traction, the vendor said.
Harper customers have reported dramatic performance gains, including server response times under one millisecond in scenarios where traditional stacks took over 100 milliseconds, and web pages loading up to 7x faster with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metrics up to 30x faster than previous architectures, the company said.
These improvements stem from Harper’s cloud and edge-native unified architecture, which collapses multiple layers of the web stack into one process that delivers millisecond response times across globally distributed systems.
By keeping data at the edge and eliminating network hops and serialization between separate database, cache, and application tiers, Harper removes the usual inefficiencies and achieves extremely low response times. As part of this initiative, Harper is releasing the source code under the Apache 2.0 license. This choice ensures maximum flexibility allowing any organization to deploy Harper’s engine in their own environment, integrate with existing systems, and build commercial solutions on top of it, Harper said.
“Open sourcing our technology is a way for us to collaborate and build alongside the developer community, and particularly theNode.jscommunity, who have made Harper as it is today possible,” said Stephen Goldberg, CEO and co-founder of Harper. “By releasing our source, we’re putting Harper in the hands of skilled web architects and developers around the world, inviting them to help shape the future of high-speed, edge-native applications. We’re excited to see what the community will create and how they’ll push the boundaries of what Harper enables while staying true to our core values of openness, performance, and reliability.”
To get started, developers worldwide are encouraged to visit the Harper repository available on GitHub, run the engine in their own environmentsleveraging Harper’s free UI,and join Harper’s community forums and discord channels to collaborate.
For more information about this news, visitwww.harpersystems.dev.