Any Updates? Commits seemed to have stopped.
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Might be time to start putting together some migration guides to take projects elsewhere. Aurelia feels EOL. Au1 is rotting while 2 is always coming soon.
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With me being unable to move to newer versions of webpack and yarn without severly breaking my project for unknown reasons, I may consider a full non aurelia re-write in Blazor.
A lot of naysayers here. Aurelia is a craft project very different from quasi-commercialized products like Angular. We canât just demand features and deadlines as this project has no major backer and basically exists out of the goodwill of the core team. All constructive criticism should be accompanied by monetary arrangements (i.e. time allotments) for how to make that feature or deadline possible.
As a side note, I believe Aurelia is currently making the mistake of operating like a lavishly funded corporate side project (like Angular) â whereas, given itâs situation it should be operating as a startup. Just my two cents.
Otherwise, for a completely free project (as in beer and as in speech â since no big corporation is pulling the strings), I believe Aurelia is phenomenally successful. Please keep at it. (And donât discount pivoting in the direction of a startup. This was Robâs original idea, building revenue streams into Aurelia, before veering off into the âcommunity projectâpath.)
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I think people are rightfully concerned. As it stands the core developers regularly donât make commits for weeks or months at a time and v1 hasnât seen a release in months. Healthy framework projects have multiple commits daily on average, monthly or better releases, articles being written and videos being published about them regularly. I hope the team can turn it around, but for now it seems they donât have the time, energy or support they need. Itâs no fault of theirs. I just hope that if it is dying, they mark it as a legacy project then help us make tools to more easily get off the sinking ship.
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Have you explored v2!
I think there is a short-term critique, which is legitimate: âMy boss is asking for widget x, when will Aurelia patch issue yâ. Worries arise.
There is then the long-term (i.e. global) critique, which is unfounded. Have you explored v2? It is like complaining you have a gold mine but the digging machines are out of stock.
My assessment is Aurelia not a sinking ship, it is a project that has pivoted from a business platform to an almost academic pursuit in craftsmanship and ergonomics. That may be overly sentimentalist, but I believe itâs important to recognize that the target audience for Aurelia has changed. Those who value most the platform value it for its vision, and not because it implements with the latest testing/webpack/etc gizmo.
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If that pivot really is happening, there should be an official statement from the core devs. Everyone who got on v1 expecting to rely on it for their business should be made aware that v2 is not for them and migration tools/guides should be made to help them get to frameworks that will support their needs.
V2 does look very interesting, but no more easy than sveltekit or mithril. So maybe Iâll spin up a few small âacademicâ projects on it, but until there are regular stable releases, Iâll be looking for a better suited SPA framework for bigger projects.
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âit is a project that has pivoted from a business platform to an almost academic pursuit in craftsmanship and ergonomicsâ.
For me, this would be the worst thing that could happen to the Aurelia.
In the first days, Rob made some very specific claims about the long term sustainability of Aurelia as a business platform, and about compatibility from versions to version. These claims, as well as the quality of the product, made Aurelia my platform of choice for web apps.
From this point of view, version 2 is so far a little disappointing. Two different version of the router, none of which compatible with the old one. Lots of major features missing or heavily changed.
Of course we are speaking about an alpha version, much is still to do. We can certainly wait some other months, and version 1 is still a terrific platform.
I have hope, but the road and the goals must be clear. An official statement from the core team about a âbusiness orientedâ product would be quite important.
A big thank to the core team, and a bright future for Aurelia
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All we need is a small economic stimulus to move things a bit! Those alarmed that âAurelia is a sinking shipâ are just panicked and simply arenât grasping how much a little economic (and support) activity can get done.
v2 is essentially complete minus a few pieces. We canât say a project thatâs 90+% finished is EOL.
I wonder if we could just pool a few bucks to contract out specific features we want?
I can volunteer a few hundred $ per piece if anyone has a list of must-haves for v2 alpha.
I myself havenât encountered any deal breakers with v2 so far (everything I need for my apps has already been addressed by the core team), but Iâm willing to donate towards solving any pressing issues.
Could we just get a list of the top 5 most pressing requests? If any advanced devs out there want to tackle them, I can donate towards your valuable time.
Thanks
Yes, but thatâs being spread out (I.e. going towards ideation, aesthetics and other long-term goals) and not directed towards specific, short-term must-haves. I believe the best approach for this specific situation (where we must patch specific gaps) would be contribution per feature.
I have not yet donated to Aurelia, but I will do so to individual devs willing to take on a few pressing issues.
Can you think of a few gaps that should be addressed asap?
Hi Andy,
I did. There is a list of issues I alone filed on Github in last 6 months: Issues · aurelia/aurelia · GitHub, and all I did to produce those bugs, was toying with Skeleton examples. Also, I happily, contributed to fix some issues in Aurelia v2 Skeleton recently: Issues · aurelia/new · GitHub I am really baffled how for you everything worked perfectly.
Yes, guys from the core team are doing a great effort. They are also helpful and answer questions, but perhaps more transparency would help everyone. I would happily contribute a bit more, where my knowledge allows, if I knew what was going on in general. Regarding lack of transparency lately, I think you agree with me:
If anyone has a list. And if we could just get a list of the top 5 most pressing requests.
Regarding your pay per feature proposal, from all experience I have in IT, to me it seems it would just bring inconsistencies to the overall philosophy and architecture of the framework. Lot of badly though, or even unnecessary features would leak in the framework, because someone is willing to pay for it and does not know/care if there is other/better way to achieve the same task.
Overall, to me Aurelia v1 is most elegant, simple, yet super-flexible SPA framework. Without unnecessary abstraction and complications. And maybe the most important for me - least intrusive and most standard-compliant framework. Because of that, I do hope that v2 does not stumble now. As youâve said, it seems like 90% finished, but like many other people here, I am also starting to worry about what to pick for a next bigger project. Canât delay that decision forever.
So, to the core team: more transparency about the situation and remaining features would go a long way.
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Yes, but thatâs being spread out (I.e. going towards ideation, aesthetics and other long-term goals) and not directed towards specific, short-term must-haves. I believe the best approach for this specific situation (where we must patch specific gaps) would be contribution per feature.
I want to see products of this costly âideationâ process⊠like roadmaps, systems diagrams, blog posts, meeting notes⊠weekly.
Can you think of a few gaps that should be addressed asap?
Yep, but not really the place. Each Aurelia project has at least a few lingering issues and/or needs dependancies maintained. I put a report in the Webpack Plugin repo last week and will probably be putting more in the new year. If you want to make those the top bounties, I wouldnât mind haha
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Both of these, definitely. At this point I feel some kind of explicit roadmap is pretty much necessary to not drive potential adopters away.
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I got it! â Youâve given me a different angle to see the overall issue with progress.
Itâs not about funding at all, but rather new users discovering the platform and running lightweight experiments with it. I have an ambitious idea⊠Aurelia+
This revives an idea my friend Adriatic had way back:
It must also combine with Rob Eisenbergâs very old idea for Aurelia UXâŠ
Aurelia needed that but we missed out. It needs to be revived⊠Now it will be born as Aurelia+ (just bought http://aurelia.plus)
Going into thinking mode. Many ideas to come. Stay tuned!
Some of us simply canât just look at Aurelia V2. It needs to be released or at least be in beta state for me to consider it. We are all developers and we all know giving a timeline is sometimes just a partially educated guess. Months have passed since the last blog post.
I see that you are enthusiastic, but clearly not experienced in professional IT.
âLittle experimentsâ that I was running are use-cases I need for production apps. I would end up hitting a bug where hot-reload updates some parts of the page, but not all, even though state did change in the meantime. Or source maps being broken, while trying to debug issue with hot-reload. Or bundling breaking as soon as I add @router attribute to a class? You have full list in GitHub issues, that is why I linked it to you. That is no problem to you?
Letâs be more constructive and mature in this thread, instead of spamming it with âWhatâs your problem people, it works on my machine!â type of arguments and first-year-university-student humor.
I definitely understand your issues, my point was very different. I believe the problem with Aureliaâs progress is not so much with funding as rather that not sufficient new users are finding it and trying simple examples with it.
There is a problem of âseeing the trees for the forestâ here. The bundling issues are stressful, Iâm sure. But all this is a symptom of a platform ecosystem without new users pushing enthusiasm from below, so to speak. Most Aurelia devs are very advanced (maybe 90% of the users here), but paradoxically I think platforms like Vue succeed because 20% of their devs are advanced while 80% are new devs pushing enthusiasm from below and thus replenishing the ecosystem.
We have an excess of very advanced and (in my opinion) somewhat jaded veteran devs here. We are caught up in endless minutiae about bundlers and tooling. This is disastrous for investment and engagement. We need an influx of less experienced devs who will be making simpler requests that can be solved more quickly and consistently. This will create momentum that will furnish an ecosystem on which more complex issues can be addressed as there would be a critical threshold of users active due to the increased momentum.
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IMHO, it started going down the hill when Rob lost interest in Aurelia in favour of Fast. Aurelia is great, by all means, even in its v1 form, but it is unlucky in the sense of publicity, unfortunately. For me personally, this is hard as Iâve invested a LOT of personal time into the bridge to Google material and a couple of other plugins. I even got V2 branches of those, which I cannot use in production because I rely on some other plugins which will never get upgraded. So, with the heavy heart, I think weâll be considering other frameworks once our main project goes live with AU1.
I think the reality is, to have a fully committed team, one needs serious funding, enough to lure full-time developers, at least one. $100 or even $1000 here and there does not cut it - regular front-end job offers much more.
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Aurelia is all experienced devs because we started using it years ago when the DX onboarding and pace of progress was pretty good. With all due respect Andy, I donât think you are understanding the core problem. Devs become jaded when their favorite framework stagnates and does not show signs of progress for months with no reasonable explanation. If you want to turn the narrative around, actions speak loudly!
Any of these would be a great start:
- Show us an organized Au2 feature roadmap. What is done and what remains?
- Give us transparency about why development tanked in mid to late October on all Aurelia projects.
- Give us transparency about when development will pick up again.
- Monthly blog posts about what is going on. Donât need a novel, just need to see someone is around.
- If Au2 core features are stable, move it to beta release and just be transparent about what is experimental in documentation. Perfection is the enemy of progress!
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