2019 LookML Open-Source State of the Union

As Looker’s annual JOIN event was being put together for 2019, something was different from years past. Whereas in 2018, open-source LookML software was near non-existent, in the course of a year, a number of open source projects had sprung up, signalling the growth of a nascent open-source community around Looker and LookML development in particular.

With this growth in open-source projects, and little in the way to organize and discover them, we saw a need to put together a comprehensive survey. We presented this overview at JOIN, and now bring it to you in the first (of hopefully many such) LookML Open-Source State of the Union reports.

We’re going to focus on LookML specifically, rather than all Looker-related projects [1], which means that most of these will be of direct benefit to LookML developers and analysts. After surveying the landscape, we’ve categorized projects into five broad functions, though some projects offer functionality in more than one category:

• Parsers: Interpret LookML text into a more usable/structured format for other software.
• Linters: Evaluate LookML against a set of rules, primarily to automate feedback to developers making LookML changes.
• Visualizers & Informational: Provide alternate presentations of LookML contents for informational or navigational purposes.
• Generators: Automate the writing of LookML from some other process or format.
• Testers: Evaluate…