There was a recent blog post with the status of Aurelia vNext. For those of you that don’t know, Aurelia is a front-end framework with a focus on standards, extensibility, ease of use and performance. It’s been a while since a new major release, so vNext is a pretty big deal.

These are some highlights of what I found pretty cool in the latest update:

  • Official name: Aurelia 2
  • VSCode integration with direct linking between bindables, observables, views, and custom attributes to their backing code representation
  • VanillaJS-like performance with JIT (Just in time) optimisations, and new AOT (Ahead of Time) optimisations
  • Extensibility that allows you to emulate the syntax of other frameworks, like Angular / Vue etc
  • A continuous focus on Web Standards
  • Developer Experience has received som pretty considerable features, here are the ones I’m excited about
    • More lifecycle hooks, and they are now synchronous. (no more queueMicroTask!)
    • New Router 🙌
    • Functional API’s
  • Multiple Integration scenarios that allow nesting of frameworks, and connecting other libraries directly in the underlying pipeline and more
  • Extensive Test Tooling support, helpers and libraries.

The team is focused on keeping the migration path straight forward, though they have mentioned there’ll be a few breaking changes.

A lot of these improvements are raising the bar so high that we’re bound to see more developers discover the joys of using Aurelia, as well as making that transition a lot easier for them with extensibility points.

I’m pretty excited about the future of Aurelia 2, but doubt I’ll be getting my hands dirty just yet. Looking forward to a preview/release candidate before I start testing it out, and more of the WIP features are in place.