The Ember Times - Issue No. 119

✌️ Emberistas! 🐹

Read the blog post on handling Promises and UI states with Ember.js 🔄, learn how Ember has helped Intercom evolve since 2014 📖, a mutable future with Ember Octane 🐹🏎, and Ember and GraphQL: a quick example 📹.

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Promises and UI States in Ember.js 🔄

Sabin Hertanu @herzzanu wrote a blog post on handling promises and UI states with Ember. Examples of this range from providing loading states when sending a post request to enabling complicated behaviour such as a backoff period before being able to interact with the UI again.

The idea was to write promise-based operations as generator functions using the provided ember-concurrency APIs.

Read the full blog post for more details!

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Ember and GraphQL: A Quick Example 📹

Watch an introduction to using GraphQL with Ember.js in Rocky Neurock @jneurock's new video! The YouTube video ⚡️quickly ⚡️ demonstrates how to get up and running with Ember.js, GraphQL, Apollo and EmberCLI Mirage.

If you've been interested in learning how to set up an application with GraphQL and Ember.js, or are just looking to learn a little more about GraphQL and Apollo and the relevant syntax, this video is a super nice resource. Plus, you get to see how EmberCLI Mirage can handle GraphQL queries! ✨

You can watch the video in full here.

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The Evolution of Ember.js at Intercom 📖

At JSDayIE 2019, Gavin Joyce (@GavinJoyce) presented a talk on how the adoption of Ember has helped Intercom grow over the years since 2014.

In particular, Gavin attributed these four keys to success:

• Shared core values with Ember
• Ability to empower new devs to ship soon meaningful features
• Confidence in upgrades thanks to Ember's stability without stagnation
• Ember's commitment to continuous improvement (case study in rendering engine)

He closed the talk by giving a preview of Ember Octane's native JS approach: "I don't know what you would remove from that. […] Everything has a purpose, and it's beautifully minimal and clean." 💙

Please have a look at Gavin's talk and share!

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A Mutable, Octane Powered Future 🐹🏎

A handy helper has existed in the framework's API since the early days of Ember 1.13. It allows to specify that a certain value - which was passed down by a parent component or controller - may be mutated by a child component. This is the so-called {{mut}} helper.

Most Ember developers are familiar with the usage of {{mut}} from scenarios as the following one:

<!-- app/templates/components/my-component.hbs -->
<input
  value={{@passedDownValue}}
  oninput={{action (mut @passedDownValue) value="target.value"}}
/>

In combination with the {{action}} helper, {{mut}} allows developers to create a useful, implicit and template-only shorthand for a setter function, that otherwise would require an explicit definition in the component class itself:

// app/components/my-component.js
import Component from '@ember/component';

export default Component.extend({
  actions: {
    updateValue(newValue) {
      this.set('passedDownValue', newValue);
    },
  },
});

<!-- app/templates/components/my-component.hbs -->
<input
  value={{@passedDownValue}}
  oninput={{action "updateValue" value="target.value"}}
/>

With Ember Octane coming soon and the new Glimmer Component API enforcing unidirectional data flow, many developers might wonder how the {{mut}} helper still fits into the overall picture. Are there any issues with using {{mut}} in future Octane apps? And are there still plans to deprecate the helper or 2-way-binding APIs from the framework in general?

You will find answers to all of these questions in an excellent deep-dive into mut and 2-way-bindings by Chris Garrett (@pzuraq). This blog post will clarify which data-binding framework APIs will remain for the foreseeable future (including Ember Octane) and which questions are still open in regards to 2-way binding components commonly used in Ember apps today.

Be sure to check out the article, share it with your colleagues and Ember friends and join the discussion on the Ember Discord!

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Contributors' Corner 👏

This week we'd like to thank @jacojoubert, @mansona, @ghislaineguerin, @pzuraq, @Frozenfire92, @Alonski, @igorT, @Gaurav0, @richard-viney, @tomdale, @dcyriller, @HeroicEric, @Panman8201, @rwjblue and @wongpeiyi for their contributions to Ember and related repositories! 💖

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Got a Question? Ask Readers' Questions! 🤓

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#embertimes 📰

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That's another wrap! ✨

Be kind,

Chris Ng, Isaac Lee, Jessica Jordan, Jared Galanis, Amy Lam and the Learning Team