The Ember Times - Issue No. 79
Blein Vie Noa, Emberistas! 🐹🎆🎇
The new year starts off with loads of new RFCs! Read more about suggested deprecations of Route render methods and selected ApplicationController properties 🈸! We also have a new RFC for a brand new look of emberjs.com, performance improvements 🏎 for the API Docs search, a new beta release of ember-cli-babel and an advanced testing exam for you!
Website Redesign 🎨
The official Ember website is due for a new look and feel. That is why a new RFC proposes a completely new look 💅 for emberjs.com. A side effect of not having updated the look and feel of the website for some years is that for people who aren’t involved in the day-to-day of Ember development, it’s easy to miss just how well the framework has kept up over the years.
The redesign aims to modernize, update and improve all the things on the website so that the impression given to the general public matches reality.
There’s already a good discussion going on in the RFC comment section, and we would love to hear your thoughts as well.
Deprecating Route Induced Rendering 🎨
Do you remember Route.render() and Route.renderTemplate()? You might not. In fact, these route methods have been less and less emphasised in the Ember learning story and are not even mentioned in the Ember Guides anymore. Although these APIs were useful in the past, nowadays a component-focussed approach allows Ember developers to omit them entirely.
Therefore, a new RFC suggests the deprecation of Route#render and Route#renderTemplate. You can read more about the motivation behind it and how to replace these methods in your application in the original proposal.
Questions? Suggestions? Leave them right in the comments section of the RFC!
Deprecating Router Props on Application Controllers 🎛
With the introduction of the Router Service it's been easier than ever to check on current app state, e.g. the name of the active route, anywhere in your application. This also means that the current ApplicationController#currentPath and ApplicationController#currentRouteName API has become obsolete.
A new RFC proposes the deprecation of these abundant properties in the future. Be sure to let your thoughts known in the proposal's comments section!
API Search Performance 🏎
The integration with our search provider, Algolia that powers both Ember Guides and Ember API Docs has now become even more performant!
The work from our friends at Algolia unlocked a performance boost of the API docs search by as high as 285% for some countries in Europe! The map shows data centers where the API docs are currently stored and (on the right) the performance improvement for the top searching countries.
New Beta Release for ember-cli-babel 🎉
@pzuraq recently announced the release of ember-cli-babel@v7.3.0-beta.1!
The plugin ember-cli-babel uses Babel and babel-preset-env to allow us to use ES6 syntax within our Ember CLI project.
With the 7.3.0 beta release, the includeExternalHelpers option is now available. This option controls deduplicating the default Babel helper functions by putting them in a shared module and lowering the payload size.
To read more on the includeExternalHelpers check out the docs!
Improving Testing One Partition at a Time 🍰
Ember's testing story already makes testing incredibly approachable to developers, but what if it could bring even more to the table right from the start? Imagine being able to speed up your test suite with parallel testing or running tests in randomized order with an ember test command in your app.
A new RFC proposes an update to the testing default in Ember apps and addons by providing ember-exam - an Ember addon developers can already use for advanced testing strategies - built into Ember's testing setup.
Be sure to read the full proposal and leave your thoughts in the comments below!
Contributors' Corner 👏
This week we'd like to thank @zeppelin, @Turbo87, @jamesgeorge007, @ppcano, @rwjblue, @chrisrng, @jessica-jordan, @mschinis, @kennethlarsen, @nummi, @rwwagner90 and @mixonic 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 📰
Want to write for the Ember Times? Have a suggestion for next week's issue? Join us at #support-ember-times on the Ember Community Discord or ping us @embertimes on Twitter.
Keep on top of what's been going on in Emberland this week by subscribing to our e-mail newsletter! You can also find our posts on the Ember blog.
That's another wrap! ✨
Be kind,
Chris Ng, Jessica Jordan, Kenneth Larsen, Michael Schinis and the Learning Team