One of the announcements coming out of the React Conference 2024 was that Remix and React Router are merging.
“Remix has always just been a layer on top of React Router — and that layer has been shrinking over time,” said Brooks Lybrand, a Remix developer relations manager at Shopify, in a blog post Wednesday. “It’s now so small that we’re just going to eliminate it. What we planned to release as Remix v3 is now going to be released as React Router v7.”
The blog post includes the React Conference recording of the news as well.
Remix is a full-stack framework for building websites and applications. Lybrand details the history between Remix and React Router in his blog post. Remix wanted to create a bridge for all these React Router projects to be able to upgrade to Remix, Lybrand writes.
“Turns out we made that bridge a little too well, specifically with the introduction of our Vite plugin and SPA Mode,” he adds. “We found ourselves looking at Remix, then looking at React Router, then looking back at Remix, and we could no longer meaningfully tell the difference.”
Lybrand urged users of Remix to continue using it.
“We’re going to be shipping more future flags and continuing to improve Remix as we prep for React Router v7,” he said. “Once we release React Router v7, we’ll provide a codemod to automatically update all of your imports.”
JetBrains released an IDE designed for test automation on Thursday.
Called Aqua, it supports developers and test automation engineers in building automated tests for user interfaces, APIs and other areas of applications, the company said in a prepared statement. It’s designed to work with major languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, SQL, Kotlin and Java. It also includes intelligent coding assistance for those languages.
The IDE includes an embedded browser, which means frontend developers no longer have to switch to Chrome DevTools.
Aqua was first introduced as a preview product in 2022, with support for Selenium API and Selenide. Last year, JetBrains added support for the PlayWright and Cypress frameworks.
Aqua is available as a commercial product and a free version for beginner test engineers.
GitLab is now offering an AI add-on for its DevSecOps platform called GitLab Duo Enterprise. It combines the AI capabilities of GitLab Duo Pro, such as organizational privacy controls, code suggestions and chat, with enterprise AI capabilities such as detecting and fixing security vulnerabilities, summarizing discussions and merge requests, resolving CI/CD bottlenecks and supporting team collaboration.
It includes an AI dashboard and value stream forecasting capabilities to help organizations see the impact of their AI usage. The dashboard also measures the impact of AI on software development lifecycle metrics such as cycle time and deployment frequency, the company said in a press release.
Organizations can customize GitLab Duo with context from their software projects for model personalization.
“Additionally, GitLab Duo Enterprise provides the option for self-hosted model deployments to support organizations that cannot connect their secure, air-gapped environments to internet-enabled services,” the company stated.
GitLab Duo Enterprise will be generally available to Ultimate customers in the next few months.
The company also this week made available a new CI/CD catalog that helps organizations improve efficiency and standardize workflows via a portal. The portal provides a way for customers to locate, reuse and contribute to pre-built CI/CD components. Organizations can also create a private catalog to distribute customized pipelines that automate workflows more specific to their needs.
The company is preparing for the June release of GitLab 17 and previewed a few of the new features coming. Specifically, GitLab 17 will offer a number of new capabilities, including:
The State of HTML survey was released this week with a more in-depth analysis of web accessibility. The findings showed that while respondents care about web accessibility, they lack technical, educational and organizational support to ensure it.
The survey queried 12,282 developers from countries around the globe, but it’s worth noting that the completion rate was around 59%. Of those, the majority had used accessibility features such as landmark features and the tab index feature, but only 8% had used the semantic element for wrapping search UI and less than 2% had tried the focus group attribute.
When it comes to disability types, the majority of web developers — 66 % — had taken into account low vision when using HTML. Fifty-two percent accounted for atypical color vision. After that, support dropped steeply for mobility impairments (27%), vestibular disorders (20%), hearing impairments (19%), learning disabilities (14%) and other cognitive impairments (12%).
Descriptive alt text, information hierarchies, form control labels and meaningful link text were the four most regularly used accessibility techniques used.
