OrigamiFrontend Components & Services

Origami Newsletter, February 2021#

Posted on by Lee Moody.
Tagged with Newsletter

TL;DR: This issue is a big one. It covers our progress toward the recently announced npm migration; a new Origami Image Service placeholder image feature; a new Origami Build Service feature to help teams keep components up to date; and a whole bunch more.

Top Things

Some of the bigger Origami news since our last issue:

Dropping Bower Support

We’ve been making excellent progress towards migrating Origami components from Bower to the npmjs registry. Origami tooling has been updated, and services such as the Origami Build Service are almost ready too.

With the release of npm7 we think now is a good time to drop Bower support. To find out what it means for your team, and what benefits we hope to achieve, see last month’s announcement.

Placeholder Images

The Origami Image Service can now generate placeholder images at specified dimensions and quality. It’s a super useful feature to support prototypes and testing. 🎉

Here’s an example placeholder request, for an image that’s 500px square, of maximum quality:

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/placeholder/?width=500&height=500&quality=lossless&source=test

A placeholder image which displays the width, height, format, and quality of the image requested as text within the image.

Build Service Updater

The Origami Build Service helps teams include components in projects quickly, without having to worry about setting up potentially complicated build steps. However it can be tricky to know when a Build Service request is out of date, and including old versions of components which could be upgraded. Now the Build Service has a URL updater page which can check a Build Service URL and let you know which of your components are out of date.

The Build Service updater. For a given Build Service URL it displays a table of requested components which shows the requested version, the latest version, whether it is out of date or not, and where to find migration guides to upgrade as required.

Special Thanks

Huge thanks to Erin Ferguson for helping us write last month’s announcement and for organising training for the team, we can’t wait and look forward to sharing what we learn!

Broader Update

A digest of other things that have happened since our last issue: