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The Aurelia 2 alpha is coming

Posted by Dwayne Charrington on February 12, 2021

As many of you know, we have been hard at work on the next version of Aurelia known as Aurelia 2 for quite some time now. Despite some obstacles (including an ongoing global pandemic), we are happy to announce we are releasing an alpha version of Aurelia 2 on March 2nd, 2021.

We want to thank the community their continued support and patience throughout the Aurelia 2 development process. We really cannot wait for you to try it out.

While we have done quite a lot to ensure that Aurelia 2 is stable and a few people on the core team have been building apps with it, we do not recommend that you use Aurelia 2 in production just yet.

Please keep in mind that the team are currently working on some features which will be released post-alpha including; AOT, Aurelia Store, full server-side offering with a rest server and a few other things in the pipeline.

What can I expect in Aurelia 2 alpha?

TL;DR quite a lot. Aurelia 2 is a ground-up rewrite that maintains its original identity forged in v1 but is improved in every way imaginable.

  • Everything that is in the v1 core
  • First-class support for TypeScript
  • Ongoing improved documentation
  • An advanced scheduler
  • Several new compiler and extensibility points
  • Out-of-the-box support for; Web Components, Shadow DOM and Constructible Stylesheets
  • Async lifecycle hooks
  • Imperative component declaration API's
  • A native script tag distribution using native modules
  • A new feature-rich@watch decorator to observe values and other pieces of data
  • Automatically computed observation without the needed for any configuration or decorator (no more @computedFrom)
  • Numerous low-level API's to write more performant web applications as well as provide plugin authors with new ways to build plugins
  • Improvements to Aurelia's Dependency Injection
  • A test assertion library and Aurelia specific test helpers
  • An easy to use e2e test setup based on Playwright
  • Revamped i18n, validation and validation-i18n plugins
  • A brand new router, including Direct Routing (convention-based zero-config routing)
  • Lifecycle hook sharing API
  • Improved composition using au-compose.

There is most likely a heap of other things we forgot about in this list, which is why we encourage you to have a play around with Aurelia when the alpha releases on March 2nd, 2021.

You can expect in the lead-up and the coming months ahead, more blog posts, tutorials and Aurelia content on how you can build Aurelia 2 applications and leverage some of the new API's and features.

Feedback

Throughout the alpha process, we encourage everyone to feedback (good and bad). If there is a new feature in Aurelia 2 you like, we would love to hear it. And if there is an issue you've encountered or something doesn't seem right, we welcome your feedback.

You can provide feedback on our GitHub repository here .

We look forward to sharing what we have been working on with you.