We have learned from our users that it can be confusing to generate a new app and not be able to edit what you see when you run the app locally. We want to give our new users the chance to make small changes to the welcome page experience, as part of their learning journey.
Today, by default, all new apps come with the ember-welcome-page, which
has a component and CSS that show up in application.hbs.
Developers can exclude this addon via a flag, --no-welcome-page when they
generate a new app.
In a production build, the welcome page assets are stripped out. You get an error and a blank screen if you try to deploy the "Hello World" Ember experience.
- Bundle size - we know that the Ember core teams want to keep Ember's production build bundle size as small possible. In general, this goal helps us Ember be competitive in quantitative comparisons with other frameworks.
- User experience - The welcome page is likely someone's first experience running Ember locally.
- Maintenance - whatever changes are made must work well for ember-cli-update
- It is strange to have an extra dependency in new apps
- New users can't find any of the text on the welcome page and will get lost/frustrated/confused as they try to make changes to it
- Let new users explore the welcome page component and see how it works.
- We want to keep the bundle size as small as possible
- Once someone has created the app and installed dependencies, they do not need any internet to see the welcome page
- Someone should be able to deploy the app with its welcome page
- The app comes with everything you need to complete the tutorial.
When you generate a new app, you can include the flag --tutorial.
These instructions are provided in Ember's official tutorials.
When you include this flag, the following things happen:
- The application.hbs file uses a component,
<WelcomePage /> - The WelcomePage component's files are created in the component folder
- CSS for the welcome page and official tutorial goes in
tutorial.cssand there's an import inapp.css - Images go in the
public/imagesfolder, or we remove our reliance on images
We would not strip out any of these assets in production builds. The tutorial will encourage people to remove them once they don't need them.
The welcome page will include links to correct version of the Guides, Tutorial, and API docs.
We would deprecate the --no-welcome-page flag and the ember-welcome-page
addon.
- Hotlink the image - this does not fit within our goal of making the welcome page work offline
- base64 encoded image - confusing to new developers
- Putting css directly in
app.css- we want to encourage best practices and make it easy to remove thetutorial.csswhen it's time.
- It's easy to miss the link to download the CSS. We should explore ways to make this more prominent.
- Devashish will open an RFC that contains the new feature and deprecation, together with Ankush and Sumit
- Try to think through as many details as possible. Think about what questions someone may have, and include your best guess at the answer in your proposal.
- Identify who would implement the changes
- Locks is available to review and respond to questions