This week, our awesome contributors worked on lots of things in the Ember ecosystem, including getting rid of some baggage and polishing the website and learning resources. We also have a surprise for you this issue, so make sure to read all the way through! ❤️
Ember Test Helpers– the package powering your testing experience in ember-qunit driven test suites – has received a couple of useful updates this week. First, the getRootElement helper for fetching the root element of the application under test has been made part of the public API. Second, the new find and findAll helpers let you select DOM nodes in your test without having to rely on jQuery-based element selectors.
Finally, you can have another look at the full API documentation over at the project’s Github repo - you’d be surprised to see how many utils you’d find there that make your testing experience in Ember apps so much easier. ✨
When building Ember components, you might have realised that there are two separate ways to interact with the component lifecycle: either via hook methods, or lifecycle events. Although both APIs have been supported consistently for a long time, many learning resources (including the official Ember Guides) emphasized the usage of the hook methods over the event-driven approach. To make the Component API more consistent and solidify the recommended convention, an RFC (Request for Comments) proposes deprecating the Component’s lifecycleevent API in favor of using hooks intstead.This RFC is open to your comments and suggestions.
Can you name a few ways to slim down the Ember bundle in 3.0? By dropping support for IE9 and IE10 in Ember 3.x, some legacy tooling could be removed! For example, the Ember.Logger util allowed a consistent debugging experience for Ember developers throughout the 1.x and 2.x era of the framework - the days of IE9 and 10. A new RFC proposes the deprecation of this logger util that is no longer necessary. You can read more about the change and leave your comments to the proposal here.
The quest issue to make jQuery optional in Ember and reduce overall bundle size of the framework made further progress through the refactoring of several more package tests (1). This issue tracks important prep work for the current RFC. Developers will be able to opt-in to continue bundling jQuery into their vendor.js file when building their app through Ember CLI. The design for how to opt in/out of jQuery in its final comment period- so hurry, suggest and comment before it’s too late!
Contributors this week were busy preparing bug fixes (2, 3) and doing lots of other cleanup and refactoring work (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13).
And finally, the historic ember-starter-kithas been archived to become a read-only repository. Check out the repo to remind you of those sweet days when Ember CLI didn’t have your back yet and you had to build up, scaffold and wire up your modules yourself, in the snow, uphill both ways.
Did you know that the Guides and a couple other parts of the Ember site aren’t Ember apps? That’s right, they’ve been around since the beginning of time… before there was Ember as we know it today… before there was fire. The ember-styleguide repo is getting off the ground, as part of the ongoing move of the website and guides to an Ember app, and make styling easier to maintain. The Statusboard Ember app has already been launched, and the new Guides and Deprecations apps are well underway. Dogfooding! 🐶
Brainstorming for the new Ember website components is ongoing, led by @MelSumner. Check out the current ideas being considered and feel free to chime in if you want to get involved. You can share your ideas on styling by opening an issue in ember-styleguide.
Some updates to the Website landed this week, including a nifty new navbar (1, 2, 3, 4). Contributors to the Guides also got a lot of cleanup in this week (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).
Do you have any questions about upcoming features in Ember or how the contributing process works in the Ember ecosystem? Are you curious how certain RFCs would impact the future of Ember?
We are starting a new section of the newsletter just for you! Every week, we will collect questions submitted by our readers (that’s you), pick one or two, and answer them in the following edition
