a blog about (mostly) computery things
If you haven't heard, Signals are a new proposal for the JavaScript language, and they've just entered stage 1! As a co-champion for the proposal, I'm personally very excited about this feature and its potential. Reactivity has become one of the most important parts of writing modern JS, and a decent amount of my time these days is spent running plumbing for reactive state - setting up and…
I started coding primarily in JavaScript back in 2012. I had built a PHP app for a local business from the ground up, a basic CMS and website, and they decided that they wanted to rewrite it and add a bunch of features. The manager of the project wanted me to use .NET, partially because it's what he knew, but also because he wanted it to feel like a native application - no page refreshes or long…
An atomic abstraction for application lifecycle
In this post, I'm going to directly compare Ember and React, using the latest idioms and best practices from both frameworks. That means I'll be using Ember Octane, the latest Edition of Ember, and React's new hooks API. A lot has changed in both frameworks in the last couple years, so I think that its definitely a good time to take stock and see how they measure up! This comparison will focus on…
This blog post is my fourth post in a series on autotracking, the new reactivity system in Ember.js. The previous three posts dug into the details of how autotracking works. What Is Reactivity? What Makes a Good Reactive System? How Autotracking Works This post, by contrast, is going to be less theory oriented. Instead, we'll be examining how you can use autotracking in practice. Pull-based…
This blog post is the third in a series on autotracking , the new reactivity system in Ember.js. I also discuss the concept of reactivity in general, and how it manifests in JavaScript. What Is Reactivity? What Makes a Good Reactive System? How Autotracking Works ← This post In the previous blog post, we discussed a number of reactivity models and extracted a few principles for designing reactive…
This blog post is the second in a series on autotracking , the new reactivity system in Ember.js. I also discuss the concept of reactivity in general, and how it manifests in JavaScript. What Is Reactivity? What Makes a Good Reactive System? ← This post How Autotracking Works In the previous blog post, we discussed what it means for a system to be reactive . The definition I landed on for the…
Ember Octane has landed along with a large number of new features, but none of these features is more exciting to me personally than autotracking . Autotracking is Ember's new reactivity system, which is what allows Ember to know when stateful values (such as @tracked properties) have changed. This was a massive update under the hood, and involved completely rewriting some of Ember's oldest…
As native classes have stabilized and more and more of the Ember community has begun converting over to them, I've heard a lot of misinformation being spread around about what they are and aren't capable of. This is a pretty important transition for Ember, so I wanted to set the record straight really quickly about a few key things. Myth 1: Computed properties only work with class that extend…
Note: This blog post didn't survive a migration from my old blog to my new one. I'm not really sure what happened there, so half of it is missing, but for posterity I'm keeping what I do have up here. Sorry about that! I've been quiet on my blog for a while now, mostly because we've been heads down working on getting Octane out the door, and I made a promise to myself not to get overloaded and to…
Time for another Octane Update! In this post, we'll be talking about some changes that are coming to observers. Specifically, we've introduced a plan to make observers run asynchronously . This is both more inline with the internal architecture behind tracked properties, and will hopefully encourage better programming practices in the future. Why Async? Making observers asynchronous may seem like…
Ember's 2019 roadmap process has begun, and we've already started seeing some great posts from various community members! We're on the tail end of the feature work for Octane, and now that we have some breathing room, I'd like to take a step back and look forward at what the next year in Ember could bring. In this post I'll be talking about what I'd like to see Ember focus on next year - the Next…
Hello again, welcome to another Ember Octane update! I've been lagging behind on the posts recently, mostly because I've been incredibly busy planning a wedding 😄 The big event is this Saturday, and I'm going to be taking some much needed vacation time over the next few weeks, so I'll be a bit quieter than usual. However, I wanted to give everyone one last update about a major feature that is…
It's been a little over two weeks since EmberConf, and three weeks since we launched the Ember Octane preview period! In that time the core teams have been hard at work smoothing over the rough edges and getting the new features ready for prime time in stable Ember. We don't have a definitive target for the release that will officially become Octane just yet, but we've already surfaced a number of…
Another year, another EmberConf! I always love coming up to Portland and visiting the community and my friends within it, it's a nice break after what is usually a hectic season at the start of the year. This year I decided to do a quick retrospective post, to get my thoughts and feels out there while they're still fresh. Lots of New Faces The Ember community is fairly tight-knit, a lot of us know…
Hello again, and welcome back! This is the fifth and final entry in the multipart Coming Soon in Ember Octane series, where we're previewing some of the various features that are landing in Ember's upcoming Octane edition, including: Native Classes (+Decorators) Angle Brackets & Named Arguments Tracked Properties Modifiers Glimmer Components ← this post These aren't all of the new features that…
Hello again, and welcome back! This is the fourth entry in the multipart Coming Soon in Ember Octane series, where we're previewing some of the various features that are landing in Ember's upcoming Octane edition, including: Native Classes (+Decorators) Angle Brackets & Named Arguments Tracked Properties Modifiers ← this post Glimmer Components These aren't all of the new features that will be…
Hello again, and welcome back! This is the third entry in the multipart Coming Soon in Ember Octane series, where we're previewing some of the various features that are landing in Ember's upcoming Octane edition, including: Native Classes (+Decorators) Angle Brackets & Named Arguments Tracked Properties ← this post Modifiers Glimmer Components These aren't all of the new features that will be part…
Hello again, and welcome back! This is the second part of the multipart Coming Soon in Ember Octane series, where we're previewing some of the various features that are landing in Ember's upcoming Octane edition, including: Native Classes (+Decorators) Angle Brackets & Named Arguments ← this post Tracked Properties Modifiers Glimmer Components These aren't all of the new features that will be part…
If you've been paying attention in Ember lately you may have heard the term "Octane" floating around here and there recently, and wondered what all the excitement was about. It may seem like a bit of a big deal - and that's because it kind of is! It's Ember's first new edition , proposed in the Ember 2018 Roadmap , and represents a major shift in the mental model behind Ember.js and Ember…
These are exciting times in Ember! With Ember Octane just around the corner, native class support has officially landed in v3.6 (with a polyfill supporting v3.4+), and the Decorators RFC has been merged and will be implemented soon (pending decorators moving to stage 3 in the January meeting). Some time ago, I wrote an article that detailed how to use native classes in Ember, along with best…