Case Study: Salesforce achieves automated, on-demand scaling of thousands of WebJars with JFrog Bintray

Bintray Automation for a Tedious Situation

James Ward, Engineering and Open Source Ambassador at Salesforce.com, created the WebJars project to package JavaScript and CSS libraries as JARs for consumption via Maven/Gradle. The project became hard to sustain manually: Ward faced hundreds of hours of repetitive deployment work (250 hours to reach 1,000 Classic WebJars; 216 hours to manage 3,600 WebJar versions), while the growing NPM ecosystem (~300,000 packages, ~500 added daily), licensing inconsistencies and incidents like #npmgate made scaling by hand impractical.

Using JFrog Bintray and its REST API, Ward automated on‑demand deployment to JCenter (with automatic sync to Maven Central), included package metadata and licensing, and ensured compatibility with NPM and Bower without creating a new repository. The automation enabled rapid scaling—4,170 Classic WebJars and 8,772 WebJar versions—and helped WebJars surpass 8 million downloads, replacing the prior manual effort with an automated, community‑available pipeline.

Salesforce

James Ward

Principal Platform Evangelist