Release Radar · August 2024: Major updates from the open source community

As winter comes to a close in the Southern Hemisphere ❄️, and summer ends in the North ☀️, developers aren't closing doors on their projects, but shipping more code. Developers are building everything from fun side hustles, to groundbreaking technology. Let's take a look at GitHub's picks for this month's Release Radar; a roundup of the open source projects that have shipped major version updates.

Bubble Tea 1.0

From Charm comes the new fun, functional, and stateful way to build interactive terminal applications. Bubble Tea is text user interface (TUI) framework built using the Go framework. Bubble Tea has been used to create all kinds of fun programs including ASCII movie art, a CLI for ChatGPT, ordering coffee from the command line, and loads more. Congrats to the team on shipping the big 1.0 🥳.

Neo.mjs 7.0

We've loved watching Neo.mjs grow. From featuring this project in the March 2022 Release Radar and our special December 2022-January 2023 Release Radar. Now Neo.mjs is back with version 7.0 🎉. Neo.mjs is a JavaScript Frontend Framework for building enterprise applications, with a focus on multi-threading. This latest version brings new syntax, enabling support to run multiple environments or versions of the framework on the same page. Check out the Medium blog post for an in-depth look at Neo.mjs and some of the new features.

Chips-n-Salsa 7.0

Don't be fooled by this delicious name, it's actually an acronym:

This is exactly what Chips-n-Salsa is, a Java library of its acronym. We featured this project in the September 2022 Release Radar back when version 6.0 was launched. Now, with update 7.0, there are some breaking changes including configurable source of randomness, enhancements to evolutionary computation, code improvements for enhanced performance, and various fixes to issues identified by static analysis tools.

PostCSS Preset Env

Who likes modern CSS? PostCSS Preset Env can help you convert modern CSS into readable browser code, by determining the polyfills needed based on the target browser or runtime environment. The latest version brings support for CSS nesting to align with the latest specifications, and the order of nested declarations and rules are preserved to better support mixins. This new update only supports Node.js 18 or higher. Check out the full list of changes in the release notes.

PlayCanvas 2.0

If you love building games, this one is for you. PlayCanvas is a WebGL and HTML5 game engine. Some of the web's most popular games have been built with PlayCanvas. The latest release has tonnes of breaking changes from removing WebGL1 support along with dozens of other legacy scripts and functions. There are also some new rendering features, materials, and blending tools. Dig into all the changes in the release notes.

And if you'd love an excuse to test out PlayCanvas, keep your eyes on the GitHub Game Off 2024 starting in November.

Material UI 6.0

If you use React, then you'll want to check out Material UI, a component library for React that implements Google's Material Design system. The latest version adds a new flag to generate CSS variables from serialised theme values. There are also new simpler ways to implement light/dark mode, the introduction of container queries, and new API for applying styles. Check out all the changes and examples in the Material UI blog. Congratulations on celebrating ten years since your first commit 🎉.

Typesense 27.0

We all make mistakes at times, and we've all made a typo here and there at some point in our lives. Typesense is here to change all that, with a typo-tolerant, in-memory, fuzzy search engine. The latest release has a new mode, better typo tolerance, support for new references and synonyms, new search parameters, and AI search improvements. Check out all the breaking changes and major updates in the Typesense release notes.

GraphQL for .NET 8.0

This is version 8.0 of GraphQL for .NET, not something for .NET 8.0 - confusing I know! GraphQL for .NET is an implementation of GraphQL specifically in .NET. The latest version brings dozens of changes from removing some deprecated methods, simplifying metadata build methods, better error messages and handling, refractor validation rules, and so much more. Check out all the changes in the release notes.

WebdriverIO 7.0

It's important to test our code to ensure it works the way we intend. WebdriverIO is a test automation framework, for e2e, unit, and component testing in the browser. It's designed for Node.js and provides support for BDD/TDD test frameworks, and can be run locally or in the cloud. The newest major release has lots of breaking changes, and a bunch of new features. Testers can use new commands, define a custom hostname for component tests, and there's support for fake timers. Check out all the major and breaking changes in the changelog.

jsdom 25.0

Here's another one for testing - jsdom, a pure JavaScript implementation of web standards. It implements the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), HTML, and DOM standards so you can test your Node.js application. This latest version changes the prototype so the chain now stays within jsdom, avoiding potential conflicts and ensures that the behavior of objects within jsdom is consistent and predictable. This version also requires Node.js 18 or higher.

Release Radar August

Well, that’s all for this edition. Thank you to everyone who submitted a project to be featured 🙏. We loved reading about the great things you're all working on. Whether your project is featured here or not, congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release 🎉, regardless of whether you shipped your project's first version, or you launched 27.0.

If you missed our last Release Radar, check out the amazing open source projects that released major version projects in July. We love featuring projects submitted by the community. If you're working on an open source project and shipping a major version soon, we'd love to hear from you. Check out the Release Radar repository, and submit your project to be featured in the GitHub Release Radar.