I decided to make the current revision of b8r “1.0” (it’s still marked “prerelease”) based on the fact it’s proven solid and usable during a year of constant use and improvement. It has been at least as robust and easy to work with as the jQuery-dependent library we developed at USPTO. I’ve just updated bindinator.com and my galaxy demo.
Recently, I made the first deliberately breaking changes and the difficulty of adapting various codebases that use b8r was pretty minor. So, I’m pretty confident that b8r is in good shape.
I also improved the appearance of the inline fiddle and test components, and added prism.js code-rendering to all the various inline code examples to make the documentation pages look snazzier. A nice change to the test library makes sure that async test results are consistently ordered, and added a visible “pending” state so you can see tests that somehow failed to complete.
b8r has some pretty nice stuff. (Although much of this nice stuff needs to be documented.) You can download b8r, put nwjs in your Applications directory and/or npm install electron and double-click a .command file to see the b8r documentation inside a desktop app. Or you can install nodejs and double-click a .command file and serve it locally via https (I also provide a .command file will generate local ssl keys). (The .command stuff is currently Mac only, for which I apologize. I imagine it would be very easy to do it for Linux and Windows, but I haven’t tried.)
There’s a cute feature if you load the b8r documentation in nodejs or electron and command-click on a component — the component is loaded in a new window. I’m planning on leveraging this functionality to let the documentation app function as an IDE.
I’m currently working on convenience methods for multi-window desktop applications (it would be super cool if you could transparently bind across windows and browser tabs). I’ve also written a new version of foldermark that uses a very simple PHP back end (nodejs servers are still a much bigger pain to deal with than PHP) combined with b8r on the client-side.
The biggest shortcoming of b8r remains the fact that my team is the only group really using it. Because we’re developing a desktop app using Electron, we aren’t constantly testing on Edge, Firefox, Safari, etc.. I know for a fact that it has problems in IE and Edge, and that some of the example components aren’t touch-friendly, and we’re definitely doing more stuff for Electron than for nwjs (nwjs is much simpler to work with, but it’s becoming increasingly irrelevant, I fear). But if you’re working in reasonably recent releases of Chrome or Chromium, b8r should be very solid.
So, that’s the way it is: b8r 1.0.