Ember 2.14 and 2.15 Beta Released

Jul 6, 2017 – By Matthew Beale, Chris Thoburn, Alex Navasardyan

Today the Ember project is releasing version 2.14.0 of Ember.js, Ember Data, and Ember CLI. You may have noticed we're a few weeks late on this release, as the start of summer may have left us a little distracted 😅.

This release kicks off the 2.15 beta cycle for all sub-projects. We encourage our community (especially addon authors) to help test these beta builds and report any bugs before they are published as a final release in six weeks' time. The ember-try addon is a great way to continuously test your projects against the latest Ember releases.

You can read more about our general release process here:

Ember.js

Ember.js is the core framework for building ambitious web applications.

Changes in Ember.js 2.14

Ember.js 2.14.0 is an incremental, backwards compatible release of Ember with bug-fixes, performance improvements, and minor deprecations.

A notable change that began in Ember 2.13.0 and continues in 2.14.0 is improved packaging of the framework itself. This includes adoption of Babel 6 and using Rollup on internal Ember packages.

The 2.14.0 release of Ember.js comes in as 7k smaller than 2.13.3 (minified and gzipped). Additionally, initial render time of real world apps continues to improve. This benchmark shows time-to-initial render of emberaddons.com measured using ember-macro-benchmark:

A comparison render times among Ember 2.12, 2.13, and 2.14

We're continuing to make similar improvements across the Ember project libraries. By measuring the impact of these changes as we make them, we will ensure complicated build changes avoid unintended regressions.

Deprecations in Ember 2.14

Deprecations are added to Ember.js when an API will be removed at a later date.

Each deprecation has an entry in the deprecation guide describing the migration path to more stable API. Deprecated public APIs are not removed until a major release of the framework.

Consider using the ember-cli-deprecation-workflow addon if you would like to upgrade your application without immediately addressing deprecations.

Two new deprecations are introduces in Ember 2.14.0:

Ember.MODEL_FACTORY_INJECTIONS is deprecated. This flag enabled DI behavior required by Ember Data prior to changes landed in Ember 2.11. It is intimate API scheduled for removal in Ember 2.17.0. If your application sets this flag you can safely remove it. See the deprecation guide entry and the implementation PR for more details.
Use of the eventManager property on components and the canDispatchToEventManager property on EventManagers has been deprecated. These rarely used and undocumented parts of the already obscure event manager API where designed for touch-event use cases that now have other and better solutions. See the deprecation guide and deprecation PR for more details.

For more details on changes in Ember.js 2.14.0, please review the Ember.js 2.14.0 release page.

Upcoming Changes in Ember.js 2.15

Ember.js 2.15.0 will introduce two new features:

RFC #225 adds the argument model to the {{mount}} engine helper. For example {{mount 'admin' model=(hash user=user)}} would provide the object with {user} as a model property on the engine's application route. See the implementation PR and followup PR for more details.
Implementation phase 1 for RFC #95, the routing service. This RFC describes a first-class public API routing service. Amongst other changes, the service provides a way for Ember components to interact with routing state and controls. This initial phase of the work includes all of the routing RFC besides the RouteInfo objects. See the major implementation pull requests for more details.

For more details on the upcoming changes in Ember.js 2.15, please review the Ember.js 2.15.0-beta.1 release page.

Ember Data

Ember Data is the official data persistence library for Ember.js applications.

Changes in Ember Data 2.14

Ember Data 2.14 brings with it a number of performance related optimizations. Ember Data 2.14.0 was released on June 18th, and the current released version is 2.14.3.

In addition to a large number of minor tweaks, three changes stand out:

File-size Improvements

Starting in Ember Data 2.14.0, builds of Ember Data use Rollup to produce a single micro-lib module. This helps with parse/eval time at boot and reduces both the pre and post-gzip sizes by ~23Kb and ~3Kb respectively. We also used Babel 6 and some manual tuning to further reduce the transpiled size.

Lazy Relationships

Previously, Ember Data would immediately create the connections between records necessary for relationships. This is unnecessary overhead if these relationships aren't immediately accessed. In Ember Data 2.14.0 relationship connections are established only upon access to the relationship.

Deferred serializer lookup

Previously, Ember Data would lookup the serializer for a requested data type immediately after making the network request. This strategy allowed the cost of serializer instantiation to be paid while waiting for the network to resolve. However, this strategy essentially traded initial render performance for a faster load of non-critical data. In this release, we're re-tuned this part of the system to be more friendly to initial rendering by deferring serializer lookup until data returns from the network.

Known Issues

Unfortunately, changes in Ember Data 2.14 appear to have introduced a number of regressions in less well defined areas of Ember Data's usage. If you experience trouble after upgrading to 2.14, we suggest locking to 2.13 and either commenting on an existing issue or opening a new issue as appropriate.

See the Ember Data issues for more information.

Deprecations in Ember Data 2.14

Several private but non-underscored methods ("intimate" API) have been deprecated in favor of underscored variants. didUpdateAll is now _didUpdateAll. buildInternalModel is now _buildInternalModel. These APIs will be removed in Ember Data 2.15.0. See PR #4949 for more details.

For more details on the changes in Ember Data 2.14, please review the Ember Data release changelog

For more details on the upcoming changes in Ember Data 2.15, please review the Ember Data 2.15.0-beta.1 release page.

Ember CLI

Ember CLI is the command line interface for managing and packaging Ember.js applications.

Upgrading Ember CLI

You may upgrade Ember CLI separately from Ember.js and Ember Data. To upgrade your projects using yarn run:

yarn upgrade ember-cli

To upgrade your projects using npm run:

npm install --save-dev ember-cli

After running the upgrade command run ember init inside of the project directory to apply the blueprint changes. You can preview those changes for applications and addons.

Changes in Ember CLI 2.14

Majority of the changes in this release happened under the hood to improve documentation as well as code cleanup and better integration with yarn.

NPM 5 and Node 8 support

Ember CLI now supports Node 8 and npm 5 out of the box, make sure to try it out! Some developers reported issues with node@8.1.0 where Ember CLI would be unresponsive. After upgrading to version node@8.1.2+ this issue no longer appeared.

Specifying a blueprint for a new app

Ember CLI 2.14.0 brings support for initial blueprint packages as an argument to ember new. This empowers other projects to better utilize Ember CLI as a part of their own ecosystem. In addition it permits experimentation with non-default Ember application setups.

For example to generate an ember-cli-deploy plugin use the @ember-cli-deploy/plugin-blueprint package (repo on GitHub):

ember new my-new-deploy-plugin -b @ember-cli-deploy/plugin-blueprint

The package will be downloaded from NPM and used to provide the initial blueprint for your Ember CLI app.

Two other examples of this feature being used in the wild are:

Generate a new Glimmer.js application. See glimmerjs/glimmer-blueprint.
Experiment with Ember's "Module Unification" filesystem layout by using the ember-module-unification-blueprint package.

Other Notable Changes

Node 7.x on Windows is now supported.
By default, Ember CLI collects usage information. Documentation has now been added describing what is collected and who has access to this information. See Analytics.md for more information.
A flag --no-welcome has been added for ember new and ember init. Use this flag to skip the inclusion of ember-welcome-page as a dependency in newly created projects.
The Ember CLI team recommends Ember Addons use the lowest supported Node release when running CI. As of this release, that means Node 4.x.

For more details on the changes in Ember CLI 2.14.0 and detailed upgrade instructions, please review the Ember CLI 2.14.0 release page.

Upcoming Changes in Ember CLI 2.15

Ember CLI 2.15.0 will introduce improved error messages that appear in your browser. This change means less checking of the console for build errors. For example:

A screenshot of improved error messages in Ember 2.15

For more details on the changes in Ember CLI 2.15.0-beta.1 and detailed upgrade instructions, please review the Ember CLI 2.15.0-beta.1 release page.

Thank You!

As a community-driven open-source project with an ambitious scope, each of these releases serve as a reminder that the Ember project would not have been possible without your continued support. We are extremely grateful to our contributors for their efforts.