The Ember Times - Issue No. 139

Mar 13, 2020 – By Abhilash LR, Anne-Greeth Schot-van Herwijnen, Preston Sego, Isaac Lee, Jared Galanis, Jesse Jordan, Amy Lam

வணக்கம் Emberistas! 🐹

Join the all-virtual EmberConf 2020 📺🎉, JHU COVID-19 dashboard - made with Ember! 🐹, Ember Twiddle supports Octane features up to Ember 3.17 💖, videos of the EmberJS Chennai meetup 🇮🇳, ember-models-table v3.0.0 🌟, QR scanning without bundle size growing 📷, check out handy examples of tests in Ember 💡, and a new RFC for handling destroyables 💥!

EmberConf 2020 is on (and goes virtual) 📺🎉

Despite the current health situation, resulting difficulties with travel and event restrictions, EmberConf 2020, March 16th-18th is around the corner and will definitely be on! As usual, you can enjoy inspiring talks about Ember, the web and open-source from community members from all around the world at EmberConf's first-ever all-virtual conference!

100% of the conference talks will be delivered remotely at the regularly scheduled time at emberconf.com - ready to watch together with your colleagues and Ember friends. Hangout with other conference attendees at #ember-conf on the Ember Discord to share your thoughts on your favorite presentations and do not miss out on your digital conference swag bag.

For more details on why EmberConf goes virtual this year and how you can join from home, please read the latest conference announcement!

Last but not least, we would like to thank everyone involved in the setup of this amazing conference we all love; in particular, we would like to thank and also ask you to please extend a warm thank you to Leah Silber (@wifelette) who is making this year's awesome EmberConf possible against all odds. If you meet her virtually, be sure to send her a ❤️!

JHU COVID-19 dashboard is Ember 🐹

Did you know that the popular dashboard made by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering being used to track cases of the Corona COVID-19 virus is built in part using Ember.js?

As reported by the CSSE blog, "the dashboard, first shared publicly on January 22, illustrates the location and number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths and recoveries for all affected countries. It was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds. Further, all the data collected and displayed is made freely available, initially as google sheets, now in a GitHub repository, along with the feature layers of the dashboard, which are now included in the ESRI Living Atlas." The data layer Github repo can be found here.

While the spread of the virus is concerning and has impacted and will continue to impact many lives, it is inspiring to see Ember being used as a force for good and helping to inform health care providers, researchers, policy makers and the broader public about how cases are developing across the globe.

Thanks to Rene Rubalcava (@odoe) for the tweet that made us aware.

A mobile friendly version of the dashboard can be found here.

Ember Twiddle supports Octane features up to Ember 3.17 💖

In March, Gaurav Munjal (@Gaurav0) and Ilya Radchenko (@knownasilya) collaborated on incremental updates to Ember Twiddle. It now supports Octane features up to Ember 3.17 and sports a new collapsible sidebar!

Ember Twiddle preview

If you haven't used Ember Twiddle before, it allows you to share and demo Ember code with other developers. You can create a sample app when filing bug issues, for example. Give it a try today!

February EmberJS Chennai Meetup 🇮🇳

On February 29th, 2020, EmberJS Chennai featured seven speakers at their third Meetup. Topics included:

You can watch all six talks today on YouTube. To learn more about EmberJS Chennai, you can visit their website and follow them on Twitter, Meetup, and the #as-india channel on Discord!

ember-models-table released version 3.0.0 🌟

After nine months of hard work, version 3.0.0 of ember-models-table has been released from beta by Oleg Nechiporenko (@onechiporenko).

This major release includes some breaking changes, so please check the release notes when you update. Complementing the release are also new demo's for version 3.x with Bootstrap 3, Bootstrap 4, ember-paper and plain-html.

Fast QR Scanning library, ember-jsqr, released! 📷

Extracted from @NullVoxPopuli's chat project, ember-jsqr is an integration with jsQR, a fast QR code scanner that demonstrates how addon developers may want to integrate with an external library using dynamic import to avoid adding to the initial load cost of an app. The jsQR library itself is 45kb (after min+gzip). This addon adds only bytes to the initial vendor bundle, or the cost of a single Glimmer component, a private service, and modifiers.

QR and barcode scanning without a growth in bundle size (thanks, ember-auto-import!) is also available in ember-scanner.

Ember test case for a CRUD application with Mirage 💡

Raja S (@srajas0), who has worked with Ember since 2018, recalls their experience of being unable to find many examples of how to write unit, rendering, and application tests. To help others and future Ember developers, Raja has created a demo app that uses QUnit DOM, ember-cli-mirage, and ember-cli-code-coverage for testing.

We encourage you to check out Raja's tutorial and see how you can improve your tests today!

Proposing a new API for confident destruction of objects in Ember 💥

As Ember developers we benefit from the framework cleaning up after ourselves when components or routes are removed. On top of that, we can even instruct the components we build to carry out additional teardown instructions, by overriding the willDestroy hook (both available in Ember and Glimmer components).

But even though these APIs are already sufficient to go about our lives as application developers, it is still a limiting way for addon authors to create useful community projects. What if your addon could add teardown work to host apps in a non-hierarchical manner, so it can never conflict with other addon's teardown functionalities?

If you want to know the answer to this question, you shouldn't miss out on reading Chris Garrett's (@pzuraq) recent Request for Comments (RFC) about Destroyables - an API proposal for addon authors and framework contributors. Be sure to join the discussion in the comments section of the original RFC!

Contributors' corner 👏

This week we'd like to thank @rwjblue, @stefanpenner, @chadhietala, @pzuraq, @Gaurav0, @Alonski, @locks, @MelSumner, @gokatz, @krisselden, @chriskrycho, @jelhan, @hjdivad, @igorT, @HeroicEric and @nummi for their contributions to Ember and related repositories! 💖

Got a question? Ask readers' questions! 🤓

Wondering about something related to Ember, Ember Data, Glimmer, or addons in the Ember ecosystem, but don't know where to ask? Readers’ Questions are just for you!

Submit your own short and sweet question under bit.ly/ask-ember-core. And don’t worry, there are no silly questions, we appreciate them all - promise! 🤞

#embertimes 📰

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That's another wrap! ✨

Be kind,

Abhilash LR, Anne-Greeth van Herwijnen, Preston Sego, Isaac Lee, Jared Galanis, Jessica Jordan, Amy Lam and the Learning Team