The Node.js Foundation is looking to help one of the most popular Node.js frameworks maintain a healthy contributor base and remain stable. The Foundation has announced that Express is on track to become its new incubation project.

“This framework is critical to a significant portion of many Node.js users,” said Mikeal Rogers, community manager of the Node.js Foundation. “Bringing this project into the Node.js Foundation, under open governance, will allow it to continue to be a dependable choice for many enterprises and users, while ensuring that we retain a healthy ecosystem of competing approaches to solving problems that Express addresses.”

(Related: Node.js 5.0 arrives)

The Node.js Foundation launched the incubator program last year. Projects under the program receive assistance and governance mentorship from the Foundation’s technical steering committee and related working groups. Express will become its own entity and will form an Express Technical Committee. In addition, the Foundation will provide two mentors to help establish the Express committee and guide them on how to execute plans and improve the future of the project and technology.

According to the Foundation, Express has had more than 53 million downloads in the last two years, and it is a key toolkit for building Web apps.

“The work around developing and maintaining Express has been a tremendous asset to the community,” said Rod Vagg, chief Node officer at NodeSource and technical steering committee director of the Node.js Foundation. “With 5 million package downloads in the last month, the stability of this project, that will get a huge boost through open governance, is very important to the efforts of the Node.js Foundation in supporting Node.js as a technology and developer ecosystem.”