We started Cube as an open-source analytics framework in 2019. It was written in JavaScript, installed as an npm package, and had its data modeling language based off JavaScript—hence the “.js”.
Since then, we have written more lines of code in Rust than in JavaScript and moved from npm to Docker for distribution. As we're writing this, GitHub says that Cube’s codebase is 55% Rust and we’re confident that its share will only keep growing. We used Rust to build Cube Store and quickly realized that this is the language in which we want to code. Cube’s SQL API, which we recently released, was implemented entirely in Rust and we’re going to migrate the rest of Cube’s codebase to it over time.
We have also seen a lot of requests to support YAML and Python for data modeling, and we’re planning to expand to those languages later this year. (Please stay tuned for updates and reach out to us if you’d like to sign up for early access to YAML and Python support.)
Therefore, for all of those reasons and then some, we realized that having “.js” in our name is outdated and misleading. We also have found it can confuse those who think “.js” implies that Cube may be a JavaScript visualization library similar to Chart.js or D3.js; while Cube does work very well with many data applications and visualization tools—including said charting libraries—they are definitely not the same thing.
And so, Cube.js is now Cube.
Our customers, community, and team have been referring to our product simply as “Cube” for quite a while already. Now, it’s time to make it official!
Over time, we’ll update our website and docs to remove the “.js” from “Cube”. As a note, whether you are using self-hosted Cube or Cube Cloud, no action on your part is required.
While this change is purely cosmetic, it reflects Cube’s evolution from a open-source JavaScript-based analytics framework to the headless BI platform it is today. Regardless of whether you’ve been a long-time community member from our open source analytics days, a new user of Cube Cloud, or just checking us out—thank you for being here. We are very proud of the path we have traveled to get here and are even more excited about what lies ahead.
Learn More
Want to learn more about building data apps with Cube?
Get in touch with us and the rest of the Cube community on Slack or Github, or sign up for a free Cube Cloud account.
Want to hear more about this change and what's next in store for Cube? Schedule a time to chat with us 1:1.