It's been a while since our blog saw some love and several months since we provided an update on progress towards a BladeRunnerJS 1.0 release, so here it is!
At the start of the year Phil Leggetter, our Developer Evangelist, left the project to re-join Pusher as their Head of Developer Evangelism. Phil has done a fantastic job (don't get a big head Phil!) promoting the toolkit and guiding user experience decisions we've made while developing new features. He'll be missed and we wish him all the best in his new role.
Phil's departure has made an impact in the capacity of the team, we're now 1 man down with the same amount of work. But it has encouraged us all to promote the toolkit and become 'devangelists' of sorts ourselves. So you'll hopefully see/hear more of the team at meetups, conferences and the writing for the BRJS blog.
We're getting ever closer to a final 1.0 release and the team have been working away finishing features and squashing bugs for 1.0. While this has been going on we've also attended various conferences to speak to developers about building complex webapps and the lessons we've learned from years of building them at Caplin.
We were at QCon London at the start of March, then at DevWeek some two weeks later, and then most recently at Jax Finance just a couple of weeks ago. Although the size of these conferences varied greatly – DevWeek being bigger than Jax Finance, and QCon London being yet bigger again – we found at all of these events that we got to talk to lots of great folk building interesting projects, and were even able to attend some of the fantastic talks too.
There was also an internal project 'retrospective' where we invited developers at Caplin to the pub for some drinks and an opportunity to provide feedback on the project and toolkit. This was a great event with some really good feedback on features we should be prioritising, such as replaceable properties for static apps & ES6 to ES5 transpilation, and how we're involving developers outside of the project.
Since the start of the year we've also released over 7 new versions, with plenty of new features & bug fixes including custom user templates; custom apps locations & globally installed BRJS.
The 1.0 release candidate was released 2 weeks ago and will be followed by a 1.0 release once we've incorporated any feedback received so far. The 1.0-RC1 release contains a large number of changes following the 0.15.x releases, including a revised plugin API; HTML template service changes and configurable locale app URLs. We're encouraging anyone using BRJS (and new users too!) to give it a try and provide any feedback, however small, via a GitHub issue. Any issues remaining for a final 1.0 release are listed under the 1.0 milestone, once all of these are completed 1.0 will be on it's way!
So what's next after the long awaited 1.0 release? We've still got lots of things we want to add or improve on. Some of these are new features, like supporting NPM libraries within BRJS, and others are bugs or enhancements to features that we've identified. The list of these can be found at https://github.com/BladeRunnerJS/brjs/milestones/1.1.
We've tried to be as transparent as possible with the BRJS project; our architecture; designs and how the team operates. If you want to get involved with the project there is a reasonably up-to-date list of 'easy pickings' or if you've identified a bug you want to fix raise a pull request and if you have any questions email me.