Since our last release, we’ve been spending our time crossing items off our todo list to make Enyo more polished and easier to grok. Now we’ve added a highly anticipated Panels layout library, a starter project template we call Bootplate (since Bootstrap, Boilerplate, and even Boilerstrap were already taken), and an updated API viewer and Developer Guide.  Read on for the full details, or just go ahead and download Enyo 2.0b5 now!

This new layout library provides a highly configurable and extensible way to manage and transition between views in your Enyo apps.  Views can be arranged as card stacks, carousels, and even sliding panels, which can animate between views via gestures or programmatically.  And what’s best, we’ve written Panels from the ground up to be extensible, meaning you can supply new arranger kinds to Panels to implement new and different view layouts and transitions.  As proof of how powerful it really is, we’ve already had Panels arranger extensions contributed to the Community Gallery!

You can test drive Panels on our PanelMatters sample, or learn more on the Panels page of the Developer Guide and in the Panels and Arranger API documentation.

Bootplate is a starter project template that contains everything you need to develop an Enyo app, and takes the guesswork out of how to organize your files and libraries, version control them, and minify them for deployment.  Bootplate is now included in the Enyo release ZIP, or you can pull the github repo.  

Learn more on the Bootplate page of the Developer Guide.

We did a major refactoring of the Enyo API viewer, which improves performance and deals better with parsing multiple libraries.  Most importantly, you can now add any 3rd-party Enyo library to the viewer, such as those you might write yourself or download from the Community Gallery.  The API viewer is bundled inside of Bootplate, and you can adjust the manifest.json file to point to any new libraries you want to browse.  Just follow the commenting format described in the new Documentation Guide, and the viewer’s runtime-parser will happily include API documentation for your custom Enyo libraries.

We have also added to our documentation set and reorganized it into chapters that form the beginning of the Enyo Developer Guide.  It lives on our Github wiki for now, but we have plans to migrate it to a new format for a better experience down the road.   You can find the index here, and check back often as we continue to build out the guide.

All other changes in Enyo 2.0b5 are documented in the release notes. And as always, we’re happy to answer all your questions in the forums, or just holler at @EnyoJS on Twitter.

The Enyo team was out in full force at the O’Reilly Fluent Conference in San Francisco last week. Enda McGrath got all things Enyo underway with his keynote speech, which you can watch below:

Enyo: A truly Cross-Platform JavaScript Framework

Ben Combee, Enyo’s lead architect, gave another talk entitled “A Deeper Look at the Enyo JavaScript Framework.” In his talk, he covered the object-oriented programming concepts that form the core of the Enyo framework and also showed how our layout and onyx widget libraries can be used with Enyo to build complex web applications.

In the booth, attendees scarfed up free t-shirts and got to play with an app we’re working on called Enyo Liveblogger.  We identified the act of liveblogging – sharing notes from a talk you’re listening to in realtime – as a great use case for when someone would need to use the same app across different devices.  Attendees got a sneak peek of this experience running on a multitude of screen sizes for iOS, Android, Kindle, and desktop devices.  

We’ll be flipping this repo open soon, stay tuned for updates as Enyo Liveblogger progresses.

To demonstrate the flexibility of Enyo, Developer Relations Engineer Roy Sutton took on a challenge to adapt fellow Fluent exhibitor Wijmo’s jQuery calendar widget for use with Enyo. In about 20 minutes, Roy was able to wrap their widget so that it could be dropped into an Enyo app. Roy’s work is available on Github here: https://github.com/webOS101/wijcal_sample.

Thanks to everyone who came to see us at Fluent!  We’re quickly booking our summer tour schedule, so be sure to follow @EnyoJS on Twitter for the latest events near you.

We’d like to clarify some of the news reports you may have read today about Enyo.

It’s true that some key members of the Enyo team have left the company, but the majority of the engineering and leadership team remains. We want to reassure you that we’re thrilled with the traction Enyo has gained to date and are redoubling our efforts to continue development, working closely with the community. 

The core of Enyo 2 is solid. We’re hearing great things from developers about the performance improvements in the last release, and we have another release on the way. After that, we’ll focus on expanding the Onyx widget set. We’ve enlisted the support of the developer relations engineers you know and love to help out as we work on growing the team.

That’s right, we’re growing. As we said earlier this month, we’re hiring — not just to replace the engineers who have left, but to increase the size of the team going forward. If you would like to contribute to the success of Enyo (and get paid for it) please let us know. And of course, all are welcome to contribute to the code by making GitHub pull requests.

Our door is open; if you have any concerns, feel free to voice them in the Enyo forums.  We’re always listening and will do our best to address your questions. We’ll also be out in person at next week’s O’Reilly Fluent Conference in San Francisco, and at HP Discover in Las Vegas the following week — we’d love to see you there.

As we wrap up the month of April, there are a number of developments we’d like to highlight.

• Enyo 2: Today we are releasing a new build of Enyo 2. This release features significant work on mobile scrolling performance and adds a highly-optimized cross-platform virtual list control.
  
  
• Ares 2: We are also making the Ares 2 github repository public today. We are still in the early stages of Ares 2 development, but we’re ready to share our progress and continue developing in the open. Ares 2 is a complete re-imagining of Ares. Most importantly, it’s now paired with Enyo 2, which means that you will be able to build apps that are fully cross-platform across mobile and the desktop web.
  
  There are significant changes to Ares itself, as well. The Ares 2 backend is built on Node.js and is designed to be run either locally or in the cloud. And regardless of where Ares itself is running, Ares 2’s pluggable, decentralized approach to file storage will allow you to keep your files almost anywhere you want.
  
  
• Community Gallery: The Enyo Community Gallery is growing fast! We are up to 33 community-submitted components for Enyo 2. Thank you to everyone who has contributed components to the gallery so far – and keep ‘em coming!

Stay tuned for more news. With today’s releases behind us, we’ll focus next on delivering an elegant, flexible solution for UI panels that works across displays of various sizes. We’re also working on making it easier to set up, maintain and build Enyo projects, and on fleshing out the Onyx widget set.