2018 Roadmap

I want to get feedback on what folks think should be our priorities in the new year. We invested heavily in R&D and performance in 2017, and I think that paid dividends, but in 2018 I’d like to focus on turning the more experimental stuff into production-ready, easy-to-adopt tools. I think we also need to follow through on our promise of uniting the Ember and Glimmer worlds.

Off the top of my head, these are some of the things I’d like to get done this year:

1. Streamline and document server-side rendering, particularly with rehydration.
2. Land binary bytecode compilation as the default mode for new Glimmer.js apps (i.e. integrate the existing work into the blueprint).
3. Much, much better error messages. By the end of 2018, I’d like all error messages to include template source rather than VM internals. In other words, treat error handling like a real programming language.
4. Better integration with the Ember language server, so you get nice things like autocomplete/IntelliSense in your editor. Doing this robustly requires a Handlebars parser that can recover gracefully from errors, so typing {{ triggers an autocomplete instead of a syntax error.
5. Interoperability with the wider JavaScript ecosystem that “just works.” Developers should be able to yarn install a package and import it into their Glimmer.js app without having to jump through hoops.
6. Bite the bullet and start documenting and talking about the webpack plugin, which we’ve now used in production.

These are the things that stand out for me based on my experience building a production Glimmer app in the second half of last year. I’d love to know what else we need to get a polished experience that you would feel confident recommending to your friends.

[t-sauer]

Here are the points I gathered (and that aren’t mentioned yet) while using Glimmer.js on a couple of smaller projects/experiments:

• Web components:
  In my opinion this could be a really strong point for Glimmer. There are a couple of points that make them kinda unusable at the moment though in my opinion.
  • Attributes: to create web components that I just can give to other developers this is a must in my opinion
  • Better bundling: Right now every component bundles its own version of Glimmer.js. If someone is using ten Glimmer web components that means the costs of loading Glimmer.js ten times.
• Build pipeline:
  • Component addon story: making it possible to reuse components from other packages
  • Improvements of the pipeline in general (a CSS change triggers a whole rebuild, including TypeScript for example)
• Improve testing: The last time I checked it was not possible to pass in args to the component in tests which makes it really hard to actually test a component

[wycats]

One thing that @tomdale left out was the “copy and paste into Ember” story, which I think remains extremely important.