Choo Weekly 01/18: Bankai 9.1, Roadmap & New Website
Happy New Year! We’ve been on hiatus for the last two weeks — but back this week with lots of goodies!
New Website Preview
We have a new website! Jon-Kyle has been hard at work during December to get this running. It’s still in early preview; we’ll continue to release features during the coming weeks (*ahem* docs), so stay tuned!
Choo now accepts multiple arguments in the emitter
We fixed a bug in Choo that prevented multiple events from being accepted. This means you can now send multiple events down in your event emitters. This should make it easier to work with multiple data entries.
emitter.emit('calc', 1) // old
emitter.emit('calc', 1, 2, 3, 4) // newhttps://github.com/choojs/choo/pull/615
Bankai 9.1
Bankai v9 was released. It includes a few small changes for performance, but also two neat changes:
- We now have a better story on how to handle the Babel configuration of dependencies (bankai#352).
bankai buildnow checks if files already exist before writing them to disk. This should make asset-heavy builds a lot faster (bankai#355).
To get the latest bankai, run npm install bankai@9.1 .
Yo-yoify source map fixes
Source maps have been a bit of an issue in Bankai for a while now. But thanks to the efforts of Renée Kooi, we’re getting a few steps closer to fixing them!
https://github.com/shama/yo-yoify/pull/60
2018 Roadmap
New year, new plans. Well not really, but we wanted to share what we’ve been up to. We feel that Choo is a solid choice for building applications, but we want to step it up even further in 2018.
The goal of Choo is to make modern web applications easy to build. Using thin wrappers around new technologies, we want to make browsers accessible to everyone. The web evolves, and so do we.
- Choo component system. When building UIs, it’s often easier to start with stateful components, and work towards stores later. We recognize this, and want to introduce a component system for Choo. We’re almost done with this, and it should be landing in a few weeks!
- Async routing. We want people to be able to asynchronously load any part of their application, with no effort. We want to optimize applications out of the box, so it stays fast — no matter what stage of development you’re in.
- Better diffing performance. While Choo is quite fast right now, there’s plenty of room to improve the performance of our diffing algo. There are new web specs landing for DOM diffing too, so this is going to be interesting!
- First class i18n support. The web is international, and so should our copy be. We want to create a great story for internationalization — so it no longer becomes an afterthought, but something you can do as you build out your applications.
- Better docs. Building websites should be easy. The web platform offers so much functionality — so much that it can become easy to overlook things. We want to create concrete guides on how to do things. Forms, architecture, translations, mouse events — all of these should have concrete answers. We’re working on creating better documentation for Choo, it’s ecosystem, and everything in between!
- HTTP/2 & ES modules. As HTTP/2 and ES modules are landing in Node, we’re going to be digging deeper into this. There’s a lot of fun optimizations that can be done using HTTP/2 push, so this is one to look out for!
Annddd a lot more! We’re committed to improving Bankai, Create-choo-app and our other modules throughout the year. They’re probably going to be less of features, and more of gradual fixes. But hopefully at the end of 2018 we’ll be able to look back with a smile to how far we’ve come.
Wrapping up
Thanks all for reading this far. We’re super excited for 2018! We hope you have a great time building projects, taking naps & otherwise having fun. Oh and stay healthy. And stay warm. (Just kidding, we’re a framework — not your parents.)
Anyway, it was good catching up again. Happy hacking!
If you’re working on something cool using Choo, let us know on @4kilobytes or Freenode#choo ✌️.
