Modular 2.0.0

Today we’re releasing Modular 2.0.0. This is not a significant release but helps us take stepping stones towards where we would like to take modular in the Future.

At it’s core modular is a tool for working with and building UIs for financial services. This means it’s focussed on excellent developer experiences, pragmatic configuration-less tooling and delivering simple workflows for it’s users.

No New Feature / No “Real” Features Removed.

Modular 2.0.0 doesn’t bring any new features but instead starts to focus on aligning modular with the rest of the node.js ecosystem and removes features which were Beta and unstable.

How are we doing this?

Removing Beta APIs

In this release we have removed two Beta APIs which were available through modular:

  1. Programmatic access to the modular APIs
  2. Support for compiling bin fields in package type in modular.

Why have we done this?

We’ve done this so that we can focus on the core experience of using modular as a command line tool for building UIs. This is focussing on super-fast build speeds for developers of apps and views, but also simplifying the workflow for package pubishers. We’ve written a guide on how to expose a bin from your package using Modular - but we should emphasise that there shouldn’t be a need to. Modular is a tool for working with UIs - not for generic Node.JS development.

Merged Changes

  • #908 Add exports fields to all public packages.
  • #918 Remove programatic API.
  • #986 Chunk size logging parity for esbuild strategy.
  • #989 bugfix: remove setupEnv.js call in testing which is a duplicate of modular’s environment setup.

What’s Next?

Next we’re looking at two main focus areas

ESBuild Experience

We’re strong believers that esbuild / swc will form crucial parts of the experience for modular in it’s next iterations. We are looking to invest in the esbuild pipeline to bring parity to the development experience that we have with the webpack build chain that exists.

Library Development Improvements

Along with aligning the packages which we publish with the Node.JS #exports standards we want to bring this option to developers who publish their packages with Modular. This change will see us move to using esbuild for transpilation of code.

Patch Versions

Patch versions of this release do not have a dedicated summary. For details of patch releases, please visit the GitHub releases page.