Live data from Hacker News

Ember.js Octane Edition

blog.emberjs.com

1–10 of 80 posts

Re: Ember.js Octane Edition

#2
For those of you aren't particularly interested in Ember or frontend development in general, here is a tidbit that may be of interest to you.

While revamping the tutorial[1] to showcase the new features and idioms, I worked on this tool[2] to automate the generation of the tutorial.

Every page of the tutorial you see is the output from markdown source files (like this one[3]) which contains executable instructions for the steps. The build[4] system will run these commands and edits the same way an end-user would, capture the output of the commands and put them in the tutorial. It also takes the screenshots by opening a real browser (via puppeteer) and navigating to the actual app that we are building as part of the tutorial.

All of these ensures that the tutorial content and screenshots are up-to-date with the latest blueprints (the files used by the generators), config files, etc, and that everything really works as-expected. It makes it much easier to maintain and QC the teaching materials, but also servers as a very useful end-to-end smoke test to ensure all the moving pieces in the ecosystem (including external components like npm, node, etc) are all working together.

Right now the tool and the tutorial content are in the same GitHub repo, but the code is actually written to be completely agnostic to Ember.js (or JS even). It just runs shell commands, edit files etc. My intention is to separate out the tool to its standalone thing, so more communities can benefit from this approach.

[1]: https://guides.emberjs.com/release/tutorial/

[2]: https://github.com/ember-learn/super-rentals-tutorial/

[3]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ember-learn/super-rentals-...

[4]: https://github.com/ember-learn/super-rentals-tutorial/commit...

Re: Ember.js Octane Edition

#3
At Intercom, we've been incrementally upgrading our almost 6 year old Ember app to Octane as the features have landed over the past 8 months. Our app continues to be in great health and we continue to ship hundreds of times a day with a constant stream of features that our customers love [1]

Octane is a huge leap forward for Ember. Its APIs are extremely well designed, composable and cohesive. The new Glimmer components and @tracked properties have resulted in waves of negative diffs as we refactor parts of our app to Octane and, IMO, are an advancement in the state-of-the-art component state tracking / reactive UI.

If you've tried Ember before and were turned off by some of its slightly weird APIs (computed properties, component APIs like tagName, classNames & event handling, the ember object model), you should take a second look.

With Octane, Ember is a framework for rapidly building high quality web applications that will remaining healthy over time as the web platform and JS ecosystem rapidly changes.

[1]: https://www.intercom.com/changes/en

Re: Ember.js Octane Edition

#5
It is such a tragedy that ember did not gain more traction. It's incredibly elegant, powerful and ergonomic. Once you got into the groove, writing ember code was so intuitive.

Glad to see they are pushing through

Re: Ember.js Octane Edition

#6
post #5

It is such a tragedy that ember did not gain more traction. It's incredibly elegant, powerful and ergonomic. Once you got into the groove, writing ember code was so intuitive. Glad to see they are pushing through

I think this is fresh opportunity for Ember to become mainstream again, modern Ember is so clean and productive

Re: Ember.js Octane Edition

#7
I like Ember.js, been using it since version 1.12, through to 2.x and now 3.x. Had been playing with the beta builds of Octane on the side, glad to see it all coming over to the main build!

Re: Ember.js Octane Edition

#9
post #5

It is such a tragedy that ember did not gain more traction. It's incredibly elegant, powerful and ergonomic. Once you got into the groove, writing ember code was so intuitive. Glad to see they are pushing through

It's no tragedy Ember is a niche product and the community is unique and hasn't gone the way of angular or react with all the false corporate stereotypes

Re: Ember.js Octane Edition

#10
One of the things I really wish Ember would focus on is reducing the amount of JavaScript shipped to the browser. I just tried out the included project with ember-cli, and the default JavaScript bundle is 2.7 MB (591 KB gzipped)[1] for an app that doesn't have any functionality. I know that you get a lot with that 591 KB (Ember's router, the Glimmer VM, etc.), but it's still much more than what you can get your React app down too, especially on initial load. For comparison, my _entire_ React application (which includes emotion, react-router, and a full data synchronization library) is only 356 KB (104 KB gzipped). Don't get me wrong: there's certainly applications where the size of the JavaScript doesn't matter, and I think Ember is _great_ for those use-cases. I just wish it could be used for smaller, mobile-focused applications without being several times larger than an equivalent React app.

[1] Apparently this is the development size. The production size is 712.29 KB (180.80 KB gzipped). My point still stands though.

Post reply on HN