Ember Conf 2015 Notes

ember_conf_2015_notes.md

Ember Conf 2015 Notes

• State of the union keynote was awesome and funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o12-90Dm-Qs. Tom & Yehuda gave a recap of what was achieved since last Ember conf and what they plan to achieve this year.

• Fastboot is coming! It renders the Ember app server side via node and sends down the html payload for the initial state. This means that Ember apps can work with JS disabled… http://youtu.be/o12-90Dm-Qs?t=40m43s

• Template syntax improvements are pretty nice. Consistent block syntax. Already available. https://gist.github.com/rupurt/75ca4629f75f19621731

• Ember will be getting a new rendering engine based on HTMLBars this year. It will address several performance problems, especially rendering and re-rendering lists. It’s called Glimmer. Much of this was spurred on by a talk Ryan Florence gave @React.js Conf earlier in the year (http://youtu.be/z5e7kWSHWTg?t=1m28s watch up to 6:05). Here is a demo of the new Glimmer engine in action https://dbmonster.firebaseapp.com/. And a status update on whether Glimmer is ready yet… https://is-ember-fast-yet.firebaseapp.com/

• Live coding by Toran was incredible. He had mad vim skills and was able to context switch between test and code super fast. He mentions several good general practices. e.g. don’t use tag names in the selector. Best TDD talk I’ve seen. http://confreaks.tv/videos/emberconf2015-test-driven-development-by-example. (Video is not up yet but this will be the link)

• TestEM is an amazing JS test runner. Console + browser if needed. Toran used it in his talk above.

• MS is dropping support for IE8 in Jan 2016

• Met a guy who does Ruby Tapas like videos for Ember http://www.sparkcasts.net/

• Web standards are changing. JS will no longer have big bang standard releases. Moving to annual release model (ES2015, ES2016). Transpilers are here to stay and will help us migrate between standards whilst keeping backwards compatibility. I feel like the fast paced nature of upcoming standards is one of the reasons we should switch away from Coffeescript. Coffeescript will always be behind and you’ll have to mix coffeescript with JS to make use of the features. Coffeescript allows this via backticks e.g. import Ember from “ember”;

• Firefox OS build tools are based on Ember-CLI. Firefox OS apps aren’t Ember based but it’s interesting to see another use case for Ember-CLI.

• Fantastic talk by the guy who created the Liquid Fire animation library. Edward is working towards an API that makes it so easy to add animations in an Ember app that he hopes they will become the default. http://confreaks.tv/videos/emberconf2015-physical-design. (Video is not up yet but this will be the link)