• 201407.20

    Composer.js v1.0 released

    The Composer.js MVC framework has just released version 1.0! Note that this is a near drop-in replacement for Composer v0.1.x.

    There are some exciting changes in this release:

    • Composer no longer requires Mootools... jQuery can be used as a DOM backend instead. In fact, it really only needs the selector libraries from Moo/jQuery (Slick/Sizzle) and can use those directly. This means you can now use Composer in jQuery applications.
    • Controllers now have awareness of more common patterns than before. For instance, controllers can now keep track of sub-controllers as well as automatically manage bindings to other objects. This frees you up to focus on building your app instead of hand-writing boilerplate cleanup code (or worse, having rogue objects and events making your app buggy).
    • The ever-popular RelationalModel and FilterCollection are now included by default, fully documented, and considered stable.
    • New class structures in the framework expose useful objects, such as Composer.Class which gives you a class structure to build on, or Composer.Event which can be used as a standalone event bus in your app.
    • There's now a full test suite so people who want to hack away on Composer (including us Lyon Bros) can do so without worrying about breaking things.
    • We updated the doc site to be much better organized!

    Breaking changes

    Try as we might, we couldn't let some things stay the same and keep a clear conscience. Mainly, the problems we found were in the Router object. It no longer handles hashbang (#!) fallback...it relies completely on History.js to handle this instead. It also fixes a handful of places where non-idiomatic code was used (see below).

    • Composer.Router: the on_failure option has been removed. Instead of

      var router = new Composer.Router(routes, {on_failure: fail_fn});

      you do

      var router = new Composer.Router(routes);
      router.bind('fail', fail_fn);
    • Composer.Router: The register_callback function has been removed. In order to achieve the same functionality, use router.bind('route', myfunction);.
    • Composer.Router: The "preroute" event now passes {path: path} as its argument instead of path. This allows for easier URL rewriting, but may break some apps depending on the old method.
    • Composer.Router: History.js is now a hard requirement.

    Sorry for any inconvenience this causes. However, since the rest of the framework is backwards compatible, you should be able to just use the old Composer.Router object with the new framework without any problems if you don't wish to convert your app.

    Have fun!

    Check out the new Composer.js, and please open an issue if you run into any problems. Thanks!

    - The Lyon Bros.

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