{"title":"Amber - 2017 in Review","summary":"The releases, contributors, and lessons that shaped Amber during 2017.","date":"2018-01-08","category":"Retrospective","author":"Mark Siemers","url":"https://amberframework.org/blog/2018/01/08/amber-new-releases-new-year","markdown_url":"https://amberframework.org/blog/2018/01/08/amber-new-releases-new-year.md","json_url":"https://amberframework.org/blog/2018/01/08/amber-new-releases-new-year.json","image_url":"https://amberframework.org/assets/img/snow-canyon-isaac-sloan-tiny-36a2be8c0ebd5c54235745700c99ce2a.png","content_markdown":"## State of Amber going into 2018\nThere have been tons of bug fixes and new features added to Amber since our last update. Six releases and 125 new commits. (Full release notes linked at the bottom of this article).\n\nMany of these features will be highlighted in blog posts in the coming weeks.\n\nWith the start of the new year, the core team would like to communicate the vision & goals for the framework and introduce the team working to maintain it.\n\n## Vision\nThe vision is for the framework to be a convergence of best practices - both from the community and existing frameworks & libraries.\n\nWe invite the developer community as a whole to help us in identifying and implementing these best practices. Please chat with us on [discord](https://discord.gg/vwvP5zakSn), open [issues](https://github.com/amberframework/amber/issues), open [Pull Requests](https://github.com/amberframework/amber/pulls). The team maintains openness to suggestions and contributions, it is part of the [team’s philosophy](https://github.com/amberframework/amber#amber-philosophy-hrt).\n\nThe vision will help meet some of the main goals of the project:\n- Create an approachable framework\n- Maintain developer happiness\n- Take advantage of the speed, type safety, and compile time checks that Crystal provides\n- Long Term - evolving with Crystal and web development as a whole\n\n## Convergence of Best Practices\nYou will see influence from the best parts of successful frameworks built into Amber. Here are a few examples:\n\n### Powerful CLI with Code Generators (Rails)\nThis leads to developer happiness and productivity. In addition, as new best practices are adopted, they will be baked in to the code generators - making it easy for you to adopt and implement.\nRead more about the [CLI in the guides](https://amberframework.org/guides/getting-started/cli/README.md#cli-readme)\n\n### Pipelines (Phoenix)\nThese allow you to easily create, modify, remove, and reorder middleware for your application.\nSee more about [pipelines in the guides](https://amberframework.org/guides/getting-started/routing/pipelines.md#pipelines).\n\n### Support for multiple ORM patterns (ActiveRecord and Repo patterns)\nThese are inspired from ActiveRecord in Ruby and Ecto in Elixir. There is support for both [Granite ORM](https://github.com/amberframework/granite-orm) and [Crecto](https://github.com/Crecto/crecto) out-of-the-box in Amber.\n\n## Team\n- Elias Perez ([eliasjpr](https://github.com/eliasjpr))\n- Isaac Sloan ([elorest](https://github.com/elorest))\n- Dru Jensen ([drujensen](https://github.com/drujensen))\n- Faustino Aguilar ([faustinoaq](https://github.com/faustinoaq))\n- Nick Franken ([fridgerator](https://github.com/fridgerator))\n- Mark Siemers ([marksiemers](https://github.com/marksiemers))\n\n## Release Notes\nYou can see the details of each release in the notes below:  \n- [v0.3.5 Release notes](https://github.com/amberframework/amber/releases/tag/v0.3.5)  \n- [v0.3.6 Release notes](https://github.com/amberframework/amber/releases/tag/v0.3.6)  \n- [v0.3.7 Release notes](https://github.com/amberframework/amber/releases/tag/v0.3.7)  \n- [v0.5.0 Release notes](https://github.com/amberframework/amber/releases/tag/v0.5.0)  \n- [v0.6.0 Release notes](https://github.com/amberframework/amber/releases/tag/v0.6.0)  \n- [v0.6.1 Release notes](https://github.com/amberframework/amber/releases/tag/v0.6.1)  \n"}