From Zero to Apache Tomcat Committer: My Open‑Source Backend Journey

Recently the Apache Software Foundation announced 40 new members, and Zhang Huxing was honored to be among them.

In 2014 he joined Alibaba's middleware team, taking over the maintenance of the company's application containers, which were largely based on an outdated JBoss implementation. The team aimed to unify all containers on Tomcat, and he set a personal goal to become an Apache Tomcat committer.

Tomcat, a flagship Apache project since its first release in 1999, has maintained the top market share for application containers for over 20 years, yet no Chinese developer had ever become a committer before.

His first contribution was fixing a failing WebSocket test case, a patch that was carefully reviewed with his team leader and quickly merged by the Tomcat community.

In October 2015 he attended the Apache Roadshow China in Beijing, hearing talks from Apache Foundation leaders and discussing community development processes with other members.

Advice from Niclas Hedhman—start with simple newcomer tasks, fix bugs, and participate in release votes—proved timeless and guided his continued involvement.

Subsequent contributions included fixing high‑concurrency Tomcat bugs encountered in Alibaba's large‑scale systems, aligning internal Tomcat builds with the upstream version, and addressing servlet‑spec compliance issues.

On August 23, 2016, Mark Thomas, a core Tomcat developer and Apache board member, invited him to become a Tomcat committer, a moment he describes as both thrilling and unexpected.

After gaining commit rights, he later became a Tomcat PMC member and, in 2017, presented Alibaba's high‑concurrency challenges at ApacheCon in Miami, receiving warm support from the global Tomcat community.

In 2017 Alibaba revived the Dubbo project and decided to donate it to the Apache Software Foundation. He led the incubation process, handling mentor communication, proposal revisions, and the final vote that accepted Dubbo into Apache.

During Dubbo's incubation, he advocated for using mailing lists over GitHub issues for community discussions to accommodate developers with limited network bandwidth.

The release process for Dubbo emphasized proper licensing, trademark clearance, and reproducible builds, with multiple release managers rotating to ensure consistency.

Becoming an Apache Member later gave him a broader platform to promote Chinese open‑source projects worldwide, reinforcing the belief that Chinese developers can make significant contributions on the global stage.