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Round-up 2021 and the future

Round-up 2021 and the future
By Team AdonisJS • Issue #5 • View online
Happy new year, everyone. I hope you had a great start to the year and looking forward to doing some great work!

Today, I want to reflect on all the work we did last year together as a small and nimble community and talk about the future (mainly the goals for 2022).
Official releases
AdonisJS v5 officially went live in May 2021, followed by a somewhat regular release cycle to improve the framework and make it more feature-rich. Following are some of the highlights post v5 release.
  • Ally: Ally adds support for social authentication to your apps. You can use it to implement Login via Github, Twitter, Google, and more services. Also, a lot of drivers are created by community members.
  • Drive: Drive is a file system abstraction on top of cloud storage services like S3 and Google cloud storage. The primary goal of Drive is to help you interact with cloud storage services without vendor lock-in.
  • I18n: I18n enables you to add multi-language support to your AdonisJS applications.
  • ALS Support: Async Local storage is an advanced API exposed by Node.js to mimic the behavior of threaded languages. The support for ALS was added by Michaël Zasso. He is both a core team member of AdonisJS and Node.js.
  • Lucid Slugify: Creating unique slugs is somewhat hard. The Lucid slugify package makes it dead simple to create and ensure the uniqueness of slugs by using the @slugify decorator on any Lucid column.
  • Attachment lite: A simple, opinionated package to convert any column on your Lucid model to an attachment data type. It uses Drive under the hood for persisting and deleting files from the disk.
Product hunt launch and demo apps
I shared AdonisJS on the Product hunt in August 2021. The goal was to share it with a broader audience and maybe get a few users to try the framework.
But, I was overwhelmed with the response framework received. We ended up being the 3rd product of the day with a lot of positive feedback.
Small wins like these bring a lot of positive energy to continue working on the framework 🙂
Demo Apps
  • Polls App: A beginner-friendly demo application you can use as a source of inspiration when working on your AdonisJS apps. You can view the live demo here.
  • Remix Jokes App: I re-created the Remix ( a React framework ) jokes app using AdonisJS and UnPoly. The goal was to showcase that traditional server-rendered apps can have the same navigation and scroll restoration behavior as full-blown frontend apps. View demo.
Learning content
Tom Gobich from https://jagr.co has stolen the show. He is cranking some great content weekly, and I am super proud to share his videos with everyone in the community.
  • Make sure to browse through the series section on the Jagr website to find all the great AdonisJS learning content.
  • Veteran Chimezie Enyinnaya continues doing great work on https://adonismastery.com.
  • NdianaBasi wrote a series of articles on HashNode showcasing creating a Google contacts clone from scratch.
  • Suppose you are still deciding whether you should use AdonisJS or not. Then check out this crash course on Youtube created by Marius Espejo.
Community packages
Visit https://packages.adonisjs.com to explore all the community packages. However, the following are some of my favorites.
Future of AdonisJS
The framework is in active development, and you can expect the story to be the same during 2022. I still have the privilege to work full time on the framework and continue shipping new features.
I will not talk about too far in the future (though I am excited about it) and share what I plan to work on in the coming months.
Testing framework
An excellent testing experience is still missing in AdonisJS. I am aware of the pain it causes while writing tests. Therefore I am working towards adding first-class support for testing.
Along with the tests runner, we will have support for:
  • Rest API and Browser-based testing. Along with the ability to log in users.
  • Refreshing database in-between tests.
  • Support for faking outgoing emails.
  • Trapping events, faking storage disk, and a lot more.
Support for Vite
I gave Vite a test run, and no doubt it is incredibly fast and joy to work with. Currently, AdonisJS pre-configures Webpack for compiling frontend assets. In the coming months, there will be similar support for Vite.
Moving to ESM
Slowly the Node.js ecosystem is adopting ES modules over CommonJS. However, the road to ES modules is a little bumpy, and also, TypeScript has some pending issues before AdonisJS can consider moving to ESM.
I see myself documenting the migration process somewhere around April 2022 and have an open window for at-least 6months for the projects to adopt ESM.
Job board
The number of AdonisJS jobs is slowly increasing. I receive roughly one request every week to recommend an AdonisJS developer for a job.
I plan to create and open source a job board application to host AdonisJS jobs and developer profiles. I do not expect hundreds of jobs to be listed there, but having a couple of dozen is going to be a great start.
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