This week: brand new content in the Ember Guides 🤓, use Ember Engines and Yarn Workspaces to maximize happiness 🤗, add visual regression testing to your Ember app using ember-backstop 🧪, and last, but not least, learn how Ember is organised and thrives 🌺!
The most popular learning resource for early and advanced Ember developers, the Guides, is waiting up for you with some brand new content!
The Guides now features a new section entirely dedicated to accessibility. It teaches you how to create your own accessibility strategy for your application, and how to implement keyboard accessible, screenreader accessible and overall barrier-free user interfaces with Ember. If you haven't done so, be sure to check it out today and leave either feedback or support for improving this section in the #topic-a11y channel on the Ember Discord!
Additionally, a soon-to-be-released version of the Guides will shine with a revamp of the testing guidelines. In particular, the introduction to testing has been updated and a new section explaining the different types of tests in Ember apps has been added. Many thanks to both @ijlee2 for working on the update and @toddjordan for the detailed review and suggestions!
When building enterprise applications with many routes, Ember Engines can help you lazy-load engines for better user experience and encapsulate code for better developer experience.
Ember Engines, by itself, isn't perfect, however. @luketheobscure shared his team's experiences of having to manually update versions (making pull requests across three different repos) to fix a single bug.
By introducing Yarn Workspaces, Luke got to eliminate this step. Workspaces also allowed him to introduce live reload, share config files across packages, and ensure certain dependencies to be on the same version across packages.
To learn more about using Workspaces, please check out his blog today!
@garris published a blog post on how to add visual regression tests to your Ember application in 10 minutes with the ember-backstop test-helper addon.
You can import ember-backstop into your application test and await it at a point in time where you want to run the visual regression testing. It will then serialize the snapshot of your DOM at that moment in time and it will send it to the Backstop-Remote service. The tutorial goes through how to verify, fix, and approve visual regression tests using the Backstop commands.
Check out the full tutorial by following along with the demo repository or reading through the BackstopJS website for more information.
In addition to amazing Ember conferences, a lot of people are promoting Ember and sharing Ember wisdom at other conferences. @locks told about Thriving through the hype cycle: an Ember.js story at CommitPorto '19. This talk gives great insights into how Ember, as a framework, is organised. Nothing too technical, but a nice peak in the kitchen of Ember.
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! 🤞
