Ember 2 does not break compatibility with previous versions

Aug 14, 2015 11:34 GMT  ·  By

Ember.js, the open-source MVC JavaScript framework used by Apple to build its Apple Music service and desktop client, has reached version 2.0.

The framework is one of the few JavaScript tools that can handle building Web, mobile, and desktop applications, being primarily used for large, enterprise-level applications.

Unlike AngularJS 2.x, which is slated for release later this fall, Ember's recently released 2.0 branch has paid close attention not to break compatibility with previous versions.

According to the development team, Ember 2.0 was focused on removing features that were deprecated with previous releases, being a version aimed at slimming down the framework's well-known bulky codebase.

As the team noted, applications created to run on Ember 1.13, its previous branch, will run without any problems on Ember 2.0 as well.

As for new features, Ember is adding some, but not as many as other JS frameworks do with their major branches.

While AngularJS, Meteor and TypeScript are currently focused on adding as much ES6 support as possible, the Ember.js team decided to postpone integration of newer JavaScript features to future 2.x versions.

"Throughout 2.x, we will continue our efforts to align Ember with ES6 and future versions of JavaScript," said Yehuda Katz and Matthew Beale, Ember.js lead developers. "As the JavaScript decorator proposal stabilizes, and as [ES6] transpilers improve their implementations, we plan to adapt computed properties and other APIs to that syntax."

In other JavaScript news...

In the past week, some interesting news about JavaScript came out.

First off, Twitch announced its plans to drop Flash support from its player, opting for a newer solution using HTML5 and JavaScript. The player will continue to use Flash for rendering the video stream, but the UI controls will be created in HTML5 and JS. A full HTML5 player is in the works as well.

Moving on the Netflix, the company's dev team published a blog post detailing some interesting changes to their servers, dropping Java from their HTML-rendering operations, and using a pure JavaScript solution, which aided them speed up the entire process by 70%.

The Meteor full-stack framework team also had an interesting article on their blog, where they revealed developers would gain only a mere 7.66KB to their gzipped code if they decided to fully support ES6 inside a Meteor app. That's actually not bad.

Last but not least, Facebook's team released a Chrome extension for their React JavaScript framework. This tool will help developers with their debugging operations by simplifying the inspection of the React component hierarchy, working as an add-on to Chrome's built-in Developer Tools.