May 2017 FeathersJS Community Update

Published in

The Feathers Flightpath

5 min readJun 2, 2017

FeathersJS continues to thrive with its lively, friendly community. We got a new Core Team member, lots of notable releases, documentation updates, and new educational material.

New Core Team Member

This month we welcomed Brendan Conron to the FeathersJS Core Team. He’s a full-stack developer specializing in iOS and interested in creating the best user experiences. He enjoys writing and contributing to open-source software. In his free time, he enjoys binge-watching Netflix and being outdoors. Brendan has single-handedly created an entirely new Feathers ecosystem with FeathersSwift. We are honored to have him join the team.

Notable Releases

Get into native application development with the brand new FeathersSwift client.

FeathersSwift: As noted in the release article, there’s a new Swift client for FeathersJS. This is an exciting release if you’ve ever tried to do native macOS, iOS, tvOS, or watchOS development and have tried implementing network connectivity in your app. No existing networking solution for native development was as convenient as the Feathers JS Client. The FeathersSwift client fixes that and offers almost exactly the same convenient API that the JavaScript client uses, only it’s adapted for Swift. There are more exciting updates in the pipeline for the FeathersSwift client. Stay tuned in the coming weeks!

Feathers works **very** well with VueJS, especially when paired with our new **feathers-vuex plugin**.

feathers-vuex: This is an exciting release for VueJS users. Vue has a well-engineered, Redux-like state management system called Vuex. feathers-vuex integrates the Feathers client directly into Vuex and eliminates all of the boilerplate that you normally would have to write on your own. It integrates perfectly with feathers-reactive, the official Feathers plugin for using RxJS on the client. Give it a shot if you haven’t tried it out, yet! There’s a full Feathers Chat example VueJS application for reference.

feathers-hooks-common: The common hooks library was updated to v3.5.1, with new hooks and fixes. If you haven’t started using feathers-hooks-common, yet, you are in for a treat. It’s a collection of hooks with great documentation that can greatly simplify your workflow. Read the full changelog for v3.5.1.

feathers-sequelize: Our most popular database adapter for working with SQL databases saw a major update in May. feathers-sequelize updates included improving support for Postgres (thank you, msimulcik) and updating all methods to return plain JS objects, by default (thank you, DesignByOnyx). The fix for returning plain objects resolved one of the most-common problems for starting out using Feathers with SQL databases. See the changelog for more details.

feathers-elasticsearch: Yes, we even have an Elastic Search adapter for Feathers! It received an update in May to support multiple-term queries by enabling the $and operator. Many thanks to jciolek. See the changelog for more details.

feathers-swagger: Add documentation to your FeatherJS services and feed them to Swagger UI. This package received some nice updates at the end of April thanks to sinedied and cpsubrian! Check out the changelog for v0.4.0.

feathers-postmark: This is a new service adapter by marshallswain that allows you to send transactional emails through the Postmark API. All you have to do is configure it with your Postmark API key and use the create method to send one or multiple emails out. Documentation is in the readme.md.

feathers-docs: The Auk release of Feathers came with huge update to the documentation at the end of April. Many thanks go out to the community members who helped the docs continue to evolve and improve in May:

Developers getting started with Feathers will appreciate eddyystop’s latest contribution to the docs: the new Hooks Middleware and All About Hooks sections. These pages are a new addition to the wonderful new Basics Guide. They give a great walkthrough of one of Feathers’ most important features. And the new request/response flow diagram is really helpful.

How the FeathersJS request cycle works. See details in our new ***All About Hooks*** page.

We continue to improve the auth docs. In addition to the Auth API Docs, we have a new section of Authentication Guides. There are a couple of new authentication recipes this month: Customizing the Login Response and Customizing the JWT payload. The latter includes some important security information to consider when building apps with JWT (which feathers-authentication uses, by default). More auth-related guides are in the pipeline.

It’s really incredible how many community members contribute to our docs! Thank you, everyone!

Our first SitePoint Article

Community member Michael Wanyoike published an article on SitePoint: Build a CRUD App Using React, Redux and FeathersJS.

Feathers Video Tutorials

Community member Ben Awad continues to add to his video learning series for Fullstack FeathersJS & React. Check out his YouTube channel to see all of his great videos!

Join our awesome community!

The FeathersJS community continues to thrive. At almost any given moment, you can login to the Feathers Slack chat and get help or have a conversation about the next great feature. In fact, we recently got listed as the 8th most-active JavaScript community on Slack!

The FeathersJS Slack Community earned a place on the Most-Active JavaScript Slack Communities list. It has only been a couple months and the number of members is already up to 1,653!

We built Feathers to be fun to use, and it just keeps getting better! Thanks, everyone, for the great contributions last month!

Join the #announcements channel in the Feathers Slack chat to get more frequent updates as they happen. ❤️

This is the first monthly FeathersJS newsletter. If we’ve missed anything, feel free to contact a Core Team member in our Slack chat. (Just look for the Feathers logo next to the name.)