6.0.0 - There and Back Again

What's Changed

This is major release with a focus on long-term realignment of web (formerly rest) and auth modules.

Web (Rest) Overhual

The Rest module is one of the core pillars of the Travetto framework, and was built upon the idea of wrapping existing Node frameworks (express, koa, fastify).  While this worked, initially, gaps started to show up across the different implementations.  The implementations relied upon the framework specific middleware for most of the HTTP related operations (cookies, body parse, compression, decompression, etc), and they all did not work the same way.  

With the this release, Travetto has dropped implicit support for external frameworks.  This means that the Web module is now a standalone framework, and is a peer to the frameworks its replacing.  All the standard middleware that was previously external framework dependent, has been rewritten as core Travetto intercpetors. This new web framework departs from express/connect structure, and aligns with a request/response model that is similar to AWS's lambda event model.

Speaking of lambda, another fallout of the rest module deprecation, is that the various lambda implementations have been removed, making way for a single lambda interface.  

Additionally, the RPC module has  been promoted to general availability and has replaced the Rest-Client module.  The Web framework has also been reorganized to ensure that the endpoint structure is aligned with method invocations.  This means that all request contextual data (the request object itself, principal, or session information), is no longer able to be declared on the endpoint, but will be defined via a new decorator @ContextParam.

Auth Overhaul

The auth family of modules have also been changed.  The primary change was more of a musical chairs than it was a rewrite.  The biggest goal was to shift the core functionality from Auth-Web, and Auth-Web-Session into Auth, and Auth-Session.  The core of auth functionality is now accessible outside of web contexts, and is ideal for building auth-aware applications, e.g. CLI commands that want to establish the auth context.  

General Improvements

The compiler has continued to receive improvements, and many fixes were introduced for file deletions/additions within the watching process, along with the related functionality for the testing framework.

Beyond the overhauls of the Rest and Auth module-families, continued improvements have been made to the compiler, the testing infrastructure, the VS Code plugin, documentation, etc.  So many core changes have been made, and the foundation for the future of the framework is solid.  

Whats Next?

The ecosystem is still waiting (4+ years now) on ES Decorators being fully ratified (including parameter decorators), including support for standalone functions.  Once all the necessary features are available within Typescript, the framework will overhaul decorator behavior, and allow for isolated functions where it make sense (e.g. DI factory functions, standlone web routes, caching, etc).

Also, with the notice that Typescript will be moving to Go for version 7+, we will continue to keep an eye on what the story is for custom code transformers.  There is a high chance the transformation logic, that is currently in Typescript will need to be ported to Go.  The window for the change is still years out, but is worth keeping in mind.