The Ember.js team has released version of 2.4. After a six-week maturation cycle as a stable version, 2.4 will be declared Ember's first LTS release.
In the blog post Announcing Ember's First LTS Release, the Ember team said LTS aims to help developers upgrade less frequently "while still getting support from the Ember project and the wider ecosystem."
As a project, Ember will provide security and critical bugfixes for the most recent LTS release, in addition to the most recent release (as we do today). We will also avoid breaking heavily used private APIs without first deprecating them in a previous LTS release.
In addition to the current schedule, the team say that LTS releases "give the community an alternative, sanctioned schedule that works better for users who prefer a slower pace."
Ember contributor Matthew Beale describes the 2.4 update as a "minor release" that is "primarily comprised of bugfixes" with backwards compatible changes. Among the fixes are #12491, to allow watching of ES5+ Getter, #12908 a fix for the issue that prevented recomputation of ArrayProxy values under certain circumstances and #12648, moving packages/**/lib/main.js to packages/**/lib/index.js.
Ember 2.4 was upgraded to 2.4.1 shortly after release, to fix "a regression that caused incorrect deprecation warnings to be emitted."
Ember 2.5 is also released in beta, bringing several additions to the public API. The most significant of these is Ember.assign, described by Beale as "a polyfill for the ES2015 Object.assign feature" described by MDN as a method used to copy the values of all enumerable own properties from one or more source objects to a target object.
The 2.5 beta also alters the behaviour of acceptance test helpers that have historically used jQuery event triggers. The change, which is backwards compatible, triggers native events via dispatchEvent and enables the triggering of non-jQuery event listeners.
Ember 2.4 LTS will ship at the same time as the stable Ember 2.5.0. Users should refer to the Ember 2.4 and 2.5 changelogs for full info on the releases.
Ember.js is released via an MIT licence. InfoQ readers can contribute to Ember.js via its GitHub project.