From 0 to 30K Stars: Building an Open-Source SpringBoot E-Commerce Suite

Preface

As 2019 draws to a close, I reflect on a year of learning and output, highlighted by my GitHub achievements: over 30 k stars and six maintained open-source projects.

mall

mall

is an e-commerce system built with SpringBoot and MyBatis, deployed via Docker. I started it in March, spent nine months developing it, and opened source in December. I handled requirement analysis, backend implementation, frontend pages, and mobile prototypes alone, learning many new technologies along the way.

mall-admin-web

mall-admin-web

is the frontend admin panel for mall, built with Vue and Element UI. Although I am a backend developer, I embraced front‑end work to showcase the backend functionality.

mall-learning

mall-learning

is a practical tutorial that dissects the mall project’s architecture, business logic, and key technologies. Started in May, it has grown into a generic project‑learning guide, with documentation covering the entire backend stack.

The initial documentation for mall includes:

Current documentation for mall-learning includes:

These documents serve both learning and real‑project reference, acting as a reliable knowledge base.

Through mall-learning I have gradually built the following technology stack:

mall-tiny

mall-tiny

is a stripped-down skeleton extracted from mall, retaining the full tech stack but only core tables for permissions and products, making it easy to start new projects.

springcloud-learning

To master micro‑service architecture, I created springcloud-learning, a Spring Cloud tutorial covering core components, Spring Cloud Alibaba, and Seata distributed transactions. It also prepares the mall project for a micro‑service transformation.

The tutorial includes:

mall-swarm

Building on the knowledge from Spring Cloud, I refactored mall into mall-swarm, adding a service registry, configuration center, monitoring, and gateway.

Architecture diagram:

Conclusion

This year’s gains surpass the previous five years of my programming career. Open‑source projects let me leave a lasting mark on the internet.

GitHub

My GitHub profile: https://github.com/macrozheng