14 DAY TRIAL // Meteor, the popular full-stack JavaScript framework that managed to raise $11 / €9.9 million in 2012 and another $20 / €18 million in 2015 to help fund its development, has announced plans for its upcoming 1.2 release.
The next major branch will be available later this summer and will boast important new features that will upgrade the framework's core to fully support the latest changes in the JavaScript community.
Meteor 1.2 will support JavaScript 2015, a.k.a. ECMAScript 6, a.k.a ES6
The biggest added feature is ECMAScript 6 support, the most recent version of the JavaScript standard, recently released by Ecma International, the organization behind the language's development.
"We think anyone writing an app in JavaScript should be using ES2015," reads the official announcement.
All the ES6 standard except the modules implementation will be added to Meteor, and since ECMAScript 6 is not yet fully supported by all browser engines, Babel will be used to convert ES6 code to ES5 and run it on all of today's Internet-savvy devices.
AngularJS and React support out of the box
Starting with Meteor 1.2, the official supported view layers will be Blaze (built-in with Meteor), AngularJS, and React.
A few weeks back, we were writing about the latest additions to the Meteor team, aimed at providing AngularJS support. Apparently, things went on better than expected, and AngularJS will be officially supported within Meteor starting with the next major branch.
Along with Angular, Facebook's React framework will work with Meteor-developed apps, and developers will have all the tools necessary to build modern JavaScript applications that adhere to the reactive rendering paradigm.
But these are not all the changes, as another one, and maybe as significant as the aforementioned ones, regards Meteor's build system, a toolchain that allows developers to automate project assembly operations.
With Meteor 1.2, the build toolchain will be modified to support larger applications, ES6, (Facebook's) JSX syntax, its own caching system, and an expanded hooks system that lets developers create plugins that work together with the build system.