Dec 2, 2012 – By Bradley Priest

There's been a lot of exciting changes going in the Ember.js community, here's a recap of some of the biggest updates.

Data Format Agnosticism

While we believe the vast majority of Ember.js apps will be using JSON for communication, there's no reason to restrict it so.

To this end we've made two changes to Ember Data's DS.Store:

1. A new extractId method has been added to the adapter for extracting the ID from a data hash, by default this asks for data.id.
2. Any method with the term JSON has been renamed to use Data instead, for instance DS.Serializer's toJSON method has been renamed to toData.

If you are using the built-in DS.RESTAdapter, these changes do not affect you.

Check out BREAKING_CHANGES for more information.

Adapter Dirtiness Hooks

In line with the efforts to decouple Ember.js from REST specifics, we've made some more changes to how the adapter dirties records in relationships.

Previously the store would dirty all the objects involved when a relationship was modified and let the adapter decide what to do with the records on commit.

As of revision 9, Ember now provides a series of adapter dirtiness hooks:

• dirtyRecordsForAttributeChange
• dirtyRecordsForBelongsToChange
• dirtyRecordsForHasManyChange

By firing these hooks at the time of dirtying, the adapter can mark the appropriate objects as dirty and move on.

If you are using the built-in DS.RESTAdapter, these changes do not affect you.

Check out BREAKING_CHANGES for more information.

New Router API

Managing state in intermediate- to large-scale applications is a major challenge for web developers. In fact, that's part of the reason so many people love Ember.js—tools like the router built-in to the framework make dealing with complex state manageable.

Still, we've heard the feedback loud and clear that the current router API is too hard to understand, complicated to maintain, and aesthetically unpleasing.

Because we think the router is the centerpiece of Ember, we've been working hard to get this right.

Implementation has been started on a new router API. You can check out the progress on the new-router branch.

Check out a quick rundown of the changes in this gist.

We believe that this is the final step to make Ember an accessible framework for new developers.

View default context

Although it has been deprecated for a while, we've finally removed the defaulting of a view's context to itself if none was provided. This should not be an issue for most applications out there, but may break example snippets around the place.

Meetups

Zendesk is hosting the SF Ember.js Meetup on Tuesday 4 December, if you're in the area please head along and hang out with other Emberenõs.

Likewise, Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz will be making an appearance at the Seattle Ember.js DecEMBER Meetup on Thursday 6 December.

That's all for this week,
Bradley Priest
@bradleypriest