Ember is the framework that the client is built with. We started with Ember 1.x and have stayed updated with the various versions of ember through the years. The bet on ember, more than just the framework at the time, is on the Ember community, its core team, its roadmap, and its ideals. Ember is a productive framework and it’s a pretty big reason we’re able to have such a huge app built by such a small team.
Ember has one surprising upgrade philosophy: Upgrading to the new major version adds no new features. It only removes deprecated features. 4.0 will bring us no new features, but will make sure that our code base fits the newer specifications which are in some ways stricter and more robust. Better. The work to deprecate and get us ready for 4.0 was carried out over the past several months, lead by Hassan.
But in the same way Ember 3.0 didn’t bring in new features, Ember 3.13 established Octane, which brought with it several patterns like tracked properties and element modifiers and native classes, which made development process easier, and allowed us to creating the new native class forms which are more robust and faster than what we used to have before. etc etc.
Ember’s current release is 4.7 (we still need to get to 4.0, remember). 4.7 marks the release of ember-data 4.7, which brings a huge performance boost for dealing with larger amounts of data in the store. That’s a direct end user benefit. We’ll also get a lot of improvement in other areas that might be less end user but matter in the long run. But to get to all that, we need to make sure our code base is up to spec and running the latest.
If we didn’t make the jump from 1.x to 2.x to 3.x to 4.x, our app would have been slow, difficult to reliably write complex features, unable to use newer browser level features, and cost us on the culture value #innovation.
This blog post is a bit loose but maybe this gives you an idea on why it matters?