We are pleased to announce that both Ember.js 1.7.0 and the first beta in the 1.8 series have been released. This comes as the seventh cycle of our release process that began after 1.0 was released.

This release brings bug fixes, potentially breaking changes and new features.

New Features

Nestable this.route

This change removes the restriction that only this.resource can have nested child routes.

Prior to this change, using this.resource would reset the namespace and in order to preserve it you had to do the following:

this.resource('foo', function() {
  this.resource('foo.bar', function() {
    this.resource('foo.bar.baz', function() {
      // All this repetition to get an
      // intuitively-named FooBarBazRoute
    });
  });
});

this.route can be nested like this.resource, but unlike this.resource, the namespace of child routes is appended rather than reset to a top-level namespace, allowing the above to be written as:

this.route('foo', function() {
  this.route('bar', function() {
    this.route('baz', function() {
       // uses FooBarBazRoute
       // generates foo.bar.baz.index
       // generates FooBarBazIndexRoute
     });
   });
});

Unnested this.route works the same way as before.

Query Params

Thanks to the tireless work of @machty and team, query params support has finally landed and is a part of the 1.7.0 release!

Ember now has first class support for URL query parameters (e.g. /?page=1&sort=last_name). With this API, each query param is bound to a property on a controller, such that changes made to query params in the URL (e.g. user presses the back button) will update the controller property, and vice versa.

The API handles many of tricky aspects of maintaining a binding to a URL, such as:

• coalescing multiple controller property changes into a single URL update
• correctly casting new URL query param values to the datatype expected by the controller property (e.g. "true" for a boolean property casts to true, "123" for a numeric property casts to 123)
• omitting default query param values from the URL so as to not unnecessarily clutter the URL with default values

Please read the Query Params Guide for more information.

Breaking Changes and Deprecations

The following are a few deprecation warnings and breaking changes that have been included in 1.7. Please review the new Deprecations Page for more details.

Controller's model property

On Controllers, the content property is now derived from model. This reduces many caveats with model/content, and also sets a simple ground rule: Never set a controller's content, rather always set its model.

bind-attr and empty arrays

An empty array is treated as falsy value in bind-attr to be in consistent with if helper. Breaking for apps that relies on the previous behaviour which treats an empty array as truthy value in bind-attr.

Other Improvements

Ember is now using RSVP 3.0.13 and brings fixes for RSVP.hash in IE8.

Ember 1.8.0-beta.1

Support for IE 6 and 7

Usage of Ember is deprecated for Internet Explorer 6 and 7, support will be removed in the next major version.

Refactored view layer

Internal implementation of the view layer has been refactored. Many of you remember script tags in the DOM:

<script id="metamorph-1-start" type="text/x-placeholder"></script>
<script id="metamorph-1-end" type="text/x-placeholder"></script>

That's how Ember knows how to update the values in the DOM. This refactor removes the need for script tags.

Actions lookup on controller

Some of you might remember that you could define action handlers in the root of the controller, like so:

App.HomeController = Ember.ObjectController.extend({
  someAction: function() {
    // handle the action
  }
});

A deprecation warning was added in late 2013 that would print a nice deprecation notice if you happen to use an action name that was also found in the root of the controller. Unfortunately, even with the deprecation, we still have the possibility to conflict with controller level methods and properties.

To define action handler, you should place it under actions hash, like so:

App.HomeController = Ember.ObjectController.extend({
  actions: {
    someAction: function() {
      // handle the action
    }
  }
});

This change will remove support for older action lookup in the root of the controller completely, and finally allow usage of nearly any action name without the need to check if that name was also used by the controller.

Also, this release introduces numerous bug fixes and small improvements. You can see a list of all the changes in the CHANGELOG:

• Ember.js 1.7.0 CHANGELOG
• Ember.js 1.8.0-beta.1 CHANGELOG