Hello Friends!
I know it’s been a little while since we’ve spoken about Aurelia 2 on the blog, so I thought I would give a brief update here.
The good news is that Aurelia 2 is moving full steam ahead and great progress is being made on many fronts. However, it’s taking a little bit longer than we had hoped for.
Much has happened over the last year. The last few months in particular have taken the world by surprise. We’re all living through a unique time in history, which is having far reaching effects on all our lives. What you may not know is what has been going on in the lives of some of our core team members. Several of our core team members have experienced various challenges either of personal health, family health, or home. I won’t go into detail on the personal lives of other team members but I can share a bit about my own story.
Last May I had a serious back injury resulting in constant pain through November. Then, in November, I re-injured my back, worse than the first, ending me up in the emergency room for an evening and then back at home unable to walk for about three weeks. I’ve been recovering slowly (doctor, chiropractic, physical therapy, massage, injection…), but this month makes about one full year of nearly constant pain for me. That’s not all that my family has dealt with though. My youngest son ended up in the emergency room as well on Christmas day with a strange appendicitis-mimicking condition. Then in January, my wife sustained a serious injury, making it difficult for her to move around. She’s still recovering from that (we are a pair to see 
). Then along comes COVID-19. While I have no evidence that my family was infected, my youngest son got sick with an odd but mild disease in February. Exactly two weeks later, my wife and I both got sick, but worse. My conditions were worse than my wife’s, including some strange breathing symptoms. This was before much was going on in the US, including testing for the virus. So, we thought it was just a flu-like cold. We stayed away from folks during that time (because that’s what we tend to do when we aren’t well) and we were all recovered in a week or two. No idea what we really had, but we’ll be getting an antibody test when it’s available. Long story short, it’s been a challenging time.
As I mentioned, a couple of other core team members have had various health issues themselves, or in their family, or challenges with living situations or other. A lot of things collided all at once, making the last 6-9 months a bit of a strain on parts of the team.
That said, we’re committed to Aurelia and work has really begun to pick up strong again, helping to put Aurelia 2 back on track. To that end, I’d like to share a few cool things that are going on:
- The Aurelia 2 kernel is almost stable and has had some great new contributions from the community, especially in the area of dependency injection. The new DI is even better than what Aurelia 1 has.
- We’ve had a chance to revisit our kernel design and have now factored out some additional packages, making various features available on their own.
- The runtime and component lifecycle is stabilizing and has some amazing new capabilities, particularly in the area of async lifecycle callbacks. It’s nicely consistent and has powerful ways to plugin and do all sorts of things.
- The plugins like store, i18n, and validation have been refreshed, including some great documentation, and are improved over their Aurelia 1 equivalents. I’m so proud of the work the team has done on this.
- The router is looking to be the best router I’ve ever seen, packed with great features both for practical scenarios, but also focusing on developer experience.
- Our test infrastructure continues to advance as we continue to grow the breadth and depth of test coverage.
- Documentation technology is progressing well, which will allow us to better document our APIs.
- Tooling, such as
makes, and the new CLI, are advancing and are available today for those that wish to give things a try ahead of release. - Integrations with web component libraries, Storybook, Native Script, and others are looking great.
- And much, much more.
I’d also like to point out that @fkleuver is participating in multiple standards-related groups now, representing Aurelia. Each month he participates in a tc39 Frameworks and Libraries group, where we have a chance to early review new JavaScript language proposals and provide feedback based on Aurelia’s use cases. He’s also deeply involved with a new Decorators group that’s working on getting that language feature designed and through the standards process. It’s great to see these things happening because it means that Aurelia is influencing the future of the language and platform itself. Let me say it even more clearly “the Aurelia team is now helping to design the JavaScript language and other web platform features” 
As for myself, I’m back at Microsoft, but this time more strategically located in the Edge organization. I’m in a unique position that gives me access to a lot of things happening in the platform as well as the standards groups. I’m now a member of several w3c groups focusing around web components, open UI, design tokens, and more. Through these opportunities, Aurelia is also influencing Edge, Chromium, and various web standards.
I hope this provides a bit of an update on where we’re at. We’re excited about Aurelia 2 and continue to move ahead. The whole world has been facing some challenges lately, and our team is not excluded from that. But, we’re committed to our vision and we’re working hard to make Aurelia 2 the best it can be.
Thanks!
by creating some components and open source app.
