It's been a busy two weeks. First we had FutureJS in Barcelona where we ran a work workshop and gave a talk on How to Build Front-End Web Apps that Scale. Then we were exhibiting at ScotlandJS and also spoke about our experiences of Testing Ginormous JavaScript Apps. Finally, we've release BRJS v0.8. As we said, a busy two weeks!
Last week we released BRJS v0.6 that provides an incremental improvement upon v0.5. Since it's just an incremental improvement there's not much to shout about. So instead of talking about the latest release I thought I'd share some stats about our open sourcing process and the uptake of BRJS.
A new release of BRJS is now available. v0.5 comes with new dependency analysis commands, IE8 support and improved stability for running tests on Windows.
The BladeRunnerJS team has been working hard over the past few weeks adding new features for our 0.4 release. Version 0.4 is the first release with NodeJS style code support, and where the majority of the BRJS functionality has been updated to use our new modular and pluggable domain model.
If you're interested in JavaScript then it's highly like that you'll have seen open discussion the Ghost blogging platform team had regarding what framework they should use to rebuild their Admin UI. A few days ago they announced they had decided to go with Ember. Here's my take on their motivations and how it resonates with the decisions we've made when open sourcing BladeRunnerJS.
In this latest sprint we've improved the BRJS Dependency Analysis performance, implemented support for serving individual JavaScript files to improve the debugging experience, added jsTestDriver plugin support for our new bundler and started on the new HTML, i18n and css bundlers.
The terms "large scale" and "complex app" are being used with increasing frequency. But when it comes to front-end JavaScript applications what does it actually mean? Are we simply talking about codebase, about application complexity or is there more to it? In this post we'll clarify what being a truly "Large Scale Complex JavaScript App" means.