Members of the Ember core team discuss reactivity, build systems, and the longevity of the Ember community. They delve into topics like web development build steps, EmberData, framework evolution, and the importance of upgradability for app longevity.
Read more
AI Summary
AI Chapters
Episode notes
auto_awesome
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
Ember's longevity is attributed to stability without stagnation and community consensus on sustainable growth approach.
Ember's reactivity system focuses on signals for optimal reactivity and improving app performance across the JavaScript ecosystem.
The 'Embroider' initiative aims to transition Ember community to modern build tooling, enhancing framework interoperability and ecosystem alignment.
Deep dives
Ember JS Core Team Members Introductions and Backgrounds
Chris Manson, Chris Thoburn, and Ed Faulkner from the Ember JS core team discuss their backgrounds and roles within the team. Chris Manson shares his experience working with Ember since 2012, focusing on mobile app development. Chris Thoburn talks about his data team involvement for the last seven to eight years. Ed Faulkner highlights the community's longevity and his initial involvement as an Ember user.
Ember's Longevity and Stability
The podcast participants emphasize Ember's longevity in the modern spa framework generation, attributing its continued success to stability without stagnation. They highlight the community's shared vision on software development approaches and philosophies, focusing on sustainable consensus and platform growth. The discussion underscores Ember's proactive approach in aligning with evolving patterns and adopting new paradigms while maintaining a stable foundation over time.
Ember's Reactivity System and Signals for Framework Interoperability
The episode explores Ember's reactivity system, emphasizing its focus on enabling conventional JavaScript data reading and writing paradigms. They discuss the utilization of signals to facilitate framework interoperability, particularly in enhancing reactivity across the JavaScript ecosystem. The conversation delves into the advantages of signals in ensuring optimal reactivity and maintaining app performance.
Ember's 'Embroider' Initiative and Evolution of Build Systems
The Ember JS core team delves into the 'Embroider' initiative, aiming to migrate the community towards standardized and modern build tooling. They highlight the project's role in transitioning from custom build solutions to industry-standard tools like Veet. The discussion emphasizes 'Embroider' as a pivotal step in aligning with the broader ecosystem and simplifying framework-specific concerns within a universal build plugin framework.
Evolution from Ember Data to Warp Drive
The origins of Ember Data can be traced back to Sproutcore in 2006, aiming to bring core data concepts to JavaScript applications similar to what Core Data offered for iOS at that time. Transitioning from Sproutcore to Ember, Ember Data separated to form its client-side ORM with enhanced network layer abstractions, aiming to address the challenges of managing data in a distributed, partially available state.
Warp Drive: Managed Fetch & Efficient Caching
Warp Drive, previously known as Ember Data, underwent a rebranding to focus on managed fetch functionality, offering a pipeline system for handling requests efficiently. The library provides capabilities for caching data intelligently by semantically parsing documents to optimize data retrieval. Unlike other libraries, Warp Drive emphasizes efficiency and offers a compact package size that rivals larger alternatives like Apollo and Tanstack query, focusing on upgradeability and scalability for long-term application development.
KBall takes another dive into recent hot topics around reactivity and build systems, this time with three members of the Ember core team. They also talk about some of the reasons why the Ember community has been so long lived, how thinking about upgradeability leads to universality, and how features first built specifically for frameworks make their way into the language specification or universal libraries.
Changelog++ members get a bonus 16 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
Neon – Fleets of Postgres! Enterprises use Neon to operate hundreds of thousands of Postgres databases: Automated, instant provisioning of the world’s most popular database.