March 2018 DoneJS Community Update

CanJS 4 & DoneJS 2

CanJS 4 and DoneJS 2 are out! Check out those blog posts for the full details on the new:

debugging tools (hello can-debug)
streaming property definitions (goodbye listening to {viewModel} events)
cli commands: donejs add heroku, travis, travis-deploy-to-firebase, & travis-deploy-to-heroku

CanJS debugging guide

The new debugging guide has lots of tips and tricks for debugging observables, modifying view-models in your console, debugging stache templates, and even creating cool graphs like this one to understand the relationships between your observables:

CanJS forms guide

We also have a new forms guide that shows you tips & tricks for attribute & event bindings, working with different types of html elements, validating forms, and more!

One of the examples: how to bind to checkboxes with stache converters.

Improved error messages & handling

Yesterday, Matthew blogged about the improvements to error handling in DoneJS. Check out that post for our philosophy on errors and how the changes to these DoneJS and StealJS packages will make your development workflow smoother:

done-autorender@2.1 & done-component@2.1: better 404 error messaging
done-serve@2.1 & done-serve@2.2: formatted HTML page for errors (with live-reload!)
done-ssr@2.1: better error handling during live-reload
steal@1.7: explains 404s for modules
steal@1.8: points out errors in your package.json
steal@1.9: adds error handling for live-reload
steal@1.10: improves the errors for dev bundles failing to load, mismatched package versions, malformed JSON
steal@1.11: nicer messages for syntax errors in ES and CommonJS modules
steal-less@1.3: explains why an @import statement fails

Here’s an example of one of those improved error messages—trying to can-import a file that doesn’t exist:

YouTube trainings

Justin’s hosted a bunch of live-streams on YouTube:

Community survey

We run a community survey every six weeks to get a feel for what everyone would like Bitovi’s open source team to prioritize (sign up here if you’re not on our list).

Here are the proposals that have been most voted for on our surveys; we’ve already started working on some of them, while others we plan on starting in the coming weeks:

can-query / make it easier to configure and understand can-set
Create DevTools for CanJS
Improve routing to components (will serve as a foundation for adding a routing guide and testing guide)
Minimize bundle size with tree-shaking & Make CanJS Tree-Shakable

Say hi in person or online

If you’re in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Silicon Valley, be sure to RSVP to our meetups in those locations:

Not in those cities? Chat with us on our forums, Gitter, or Twitter!

Contributors

We are really excited to have Maarten Bicknese take up maintaining steal-sass!

A little info about Maarten: he’s from the Netherlands and works as a freelance consultant. His first exposure to StealJS was through an article on CSS-Tricks about the modlet workflow.

He’s off to a quick start with steal-sass 1.1, which supports Node 6+ and includes some PRs that had gone unmerged while the project was unmaintained. Welcome to the team Maarten!

Last but certainly not least, we’d like to recognize the following people for their contributions to our open source projects:

Aliaksei Yanachkin’s contributions to CanJS
Brad Momberger’s contributions to CanJS
Christopher Baker’s contributions to bit-docs and CanJS
Frank Lemanschik’s contributions to CanJS, DoneJS, and StealJS
John Gardner’s contributions to CanJS
Maarten Bicknese’s contributions to StealJS
Manuel Mujica’s contributions to bit-docs, CanJS, DoneJS, and StealJS
Mike 'mitch' Mitchel’s contributions to CanJS

Hire us

DoneJS’s main sponsor is Bitovi. We provide web and mobile application consulting services. We can build your app, work with you to build it, or teach you how to build it. To learn more visit bitovi.com or @bitovi on Twitter.