Ember.js moves to prerelease with 1.0 feature set

Ember.js, the JavaScript/Rails model-view-controller framework is approaching its 1.0 release and the developers have now made a pre-release version available for others to get a feel for the reworked system.

Ember.js uses an auto-updating templating engine, combined with data-binding to simplify the process of creating web applications. At the core of Ember.js 1.0's new features is a redesigned router system designed to manage ambitious applications with "a lot of state"; this should avoid applications getting into bad states while allowing the URL to be a serialisation of the application state. Tom Dale, Ember.js developer, discusses the routing approach in a May blog post.

The developers warn that the router API isn't complete. Other changes include modifications to the way view context is managed, #each and #with supporting custom properties, a mixin for sorting functionality and a move to a minimum version of 1.7 for jQuery, dropping support for 1.6. The Handlebars templating library has been unbundled from Ember.js for easier version control. Full details of the changes are given in the announcement and the change log.

Ember.js is based on SproutCore and was to be version 2.0 of the framework. After SproutCore's creator Strobe was acquired by Facebook, SproutCore 2.0 became Ember.js and was taken over by former Strobe developers, Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale, at their new company, Tilde.

The pre-release version of Ember.js 1.0 is available to download along with a starter kit. Documentation, guides and an API reference are also available. Ember.js code can also be found, for forking, in the project's Github repository and is available under an MIT style licence.

(djwm)