Blog

On Computed Properties vs. Helpers

Ember's computed properties are a great mechanism for encapsulating reactive logic and implementing consistent, auto-updating UIs. Since the past year or so though, there seems to be an increasing tendency in the community to use template helpers as the main tool for expressing this kind of logic right in the templates. Following up on a talk I gave at last year's EmberFest, I'll elaborate in this post why I think that is often not the best choice and what the drawbacks are.

Using npm libraries in Ember CLI

tl;dr Use npm instead of Bower whenever you can!

With Ember 2.11 we are now using the ember-source module and no longer the ember Bower package. In the upcoming Ember CLI 2.12 release, Bower will also no longer be installed by default and only install lazily when an addon requests it. All this indicates that from now on we should try to use npm packages instead of Bower whenever possible. This blog post will explain how we can do that and what options are available to us.

Class based Computed Properties

We think Computed Properties in Ember are awesome. We also think they are in many cases the better alternative to template helpers as they allow for cleaner separation of where a computation is triggered and the implementation of that computation. In some cases though it is currently very hard to do things in Computed Properties (and Computed Property macros in particular) that are possible with Class based helpers. With the introduction of Class based Computed Properties we're aiming at making these scenarios solvable easily.

New features for ember-test-selectors

In March 2016 we have released the first version of ember-test-selectors and today we are proud to present you our next milestone: 0.1.0.

While 0.1.0 does not sound like much has changed, the addon has actually gained a lot of new functionality and should be considered our release candidate for 1.0.0.

This blog post will highlight the major changes in this release, and will give you a short introduction into how we have implemented these new features.

Out-of-the-box FastBoot support in Ember Simple Auth

Ever since FastBoot was first announced at EmberConf 2015 it was clear to us that we wanted to have out-of-the-box support for it in Ember Simple Auth. Our goal was to make sure that Ember Simple Auth did not keep anyone from adopting FastBoot and adopting FastBoot would not result in people having to figure out their own authentication and authorization solutions. Today we're happy to announce the availability of Ember Simple Auth 1.2.0-beta.1, the first release with out-of-the-box support for FastBoot.

Using better element selectors in Ember.js tests

We just released ember-test-selectors, an Ember Addon that enables better element selectors in Ember.js tests. It removes all data attributes starting with data-test- from the application's templates in the production environment so that these attributes can be used to select elements with in acceptance and integration tests without polluting the markup that is delivered to the end user.

ember-cli-deploy-notifications

A few weeks ago a new version of the "official" ember deployment solution ember-cli-deploy was released:

ember-cli-deploy 0.5 is now released and ready for use with a great docs site and already-rich plugin ecosystem: https://t.co/6yhjmjQrYD

— Luke Melia (@lukemelia) 29. Oktober 2015

Updating to Ember Simple Auth 1.0

With Ember Simple Auth 1.0.0 having been released a few days ago, a lot of people will want to upgrade their applications to it so they can finally make the switch to Ember.js 2.0. While quite a big part of the public API has been changed in 1.0.0, updating an application from Ember Simple Auth 0.8.0 or earlier versions is actually not as hard as it might appear at first glance. This post explains the steps that are necessary to bring an application to 1.0.0.

Rails API Auth

We are happy to announce the first public release of the rails_api_auth gem. railsapi_auth is a \*lightweight Rails Engine that implements the "Resource Owner Password Credentials Grant"_ OAuth 2.0 flow** as well as Facebook authentication and is **built for usage in API projects\*. If you’re building a client side application with e.g. a browser MVC like Ember.js (where you might be using Ember Simple Auth which works great with rails_api_auth of course), a mobile app or anything else that’s backed by a Rails-based API, rails_api_auth is for you.

Ember Simple Auth 1.0 - a first look

The first beta of Ember Simple Auth 1.0 will be released soon and this post provides a first look at the changes that come with it.