New Symfony Releases Announced

On December 9th 2021 Symfony announced several new releases:

• Version 2.0 of all symfony/ux libraries
• Version 3.0 of @symfony/stimulus-bridge
• Version 2.0 of @symfony/stimulus-testing

Symfony UX is an initiative and set of libraries centered around the Stimulus JavaScript library.

Stimulus 3 Support

Stimulus 3.0 - a new major version - was released in September. It includes a few nice new features - like a "debug" mode and "values defaults" - but no major changes and no backwards compatibility breaks.

Why the new major version?

The library was renamed from stimulus to @hotwired/stimulus. Just the name of the library changed but not much anything else. However, the name change required Symfony's UX libraries to need a new major version.

Symfony UX Changes

There are a few big changes with the new Symfony UX releases:

1) Support changed from stimulus to @hotwired/stimulus: The biggest change with the new major releases listed above is that support for stimulus was dropped and replaced with @hotwired/stimulus (i.e. version 3 of the library). This difference won't be noticeable in your applications, except that you'll need to adjust the import { Controller } from 'stimulus' lines in your code.

2) Support for IE11 was dropped: Support for IE11 is dropped in Version 3 of Stimulus and also in Symfony UX libraries, incorporating a brand new build system. The result is smaller final JavaScript sizes. For continued support of IE 11, use Stimulus 2 and the previous version of the UX libraries.

3) data- Attributes Changed to the Values API: Many of the UX packages allowed users to configure things by adding data- attributes to an element. Those have been replaced by using the "Values API" from Stimulus.

In addition to the above items, symfony/ux-chartjs was updated to use chart.js version 3, and various new events were added to UX controllers to make them more configurable.

To know more and how to upgrade read: Symfony blog