Bacon Blog is Back!

Been a while since my last post on this blog. And it's not that stuff hasn't been happening around Bacon.js. It's more that I haven't had time to write and/or have kept the bar a bit high. But now it's time for a change.

I'm gonna throw a post here weekly from now on, with short posts that take less than 30 minutes to write. Let's see what happens.

I just made 2 releases of Bacon.js today. And in total, there's been 32 minor releases since 0.7.0 that my previous post covered. A lot of bugs have been fixed and performance improvements have been made. So if you're for some reason using Bacon.js version < 0.7.32, you should update! In case you're interested in a detailed list of changes, have a look at RELEASE-NOTES.md!

Anyway, let me briefly introduce the API changes since 0.7.0.

Error handling improvements (#310)

Added Bacon.retry for retrying a background request a few times before giving up and producing an Error event. Here's @mileskin's original example with JQuery Ajax.

Bacon.retry
  source: -> Bacon.fromPromise($.ajax(...))
  retries: 4
  interval: ({retriesDone}) -> (1 + retriesDone) * 5000
  isRetryable: (response) -> response.status isnt 401

Also added flatMapError for flatMapping errors.

flatMapWithConcurrencyLimit, flatMapConcat, bufferingThrottle, holdWhen (#324)

The bufferingThrottle method allows you to throttle events with a buffer. So, when a regular throttle discards excess events, this one will buffer them.

The flatMapWithConcurrencyLimit method is a variant of flatMap that limits the number of concurrently active child streams, so that you can, for instance limit the number of concurrent AJAX requests to a certain maximum by automatically queuing the excess requests.

The flatMapConcat method is like the previous, but with concurrency limit of 1.

The holdWhen method can be used like a valve, to buffer events when a Property holds the value true, and release all buffered events when the value changes to false.

Support "on/off" events in Bacon.fromEventTarget (#461)

Some libs use the "on" and "off" methods for registering/removing event listeners. Now it's easy to integrate into those libs too. So, for instance, if you use CodeMirror and want a stream of code changes in the editor, you can now

    Bacon.fromEventTarget(codeMirror, "change")

That's it for now. Will come back next week. Suggestions for topics?