We’d like to give you a heads up about upcoming changes to Fonto. These changes specifically concern you as a developer, and how you work with Fonto’s SDK. They do not directly affect Fonto’s end users.

For the upcoming 7.7 release of Fonto we plan to modernise Fonto’s build tools, which are used for running development builds and creating production builds. This allows us to implement some much-desired improvements. Specifically, for this release we plan to provide you the following two:

1. Faster editor reloads during development.
   Currently, a reload of the editor after a configuration change can take up to a few minutes. This can accumulate to a lot of time spent waiting. We aim to boost your productivity by reducing this to a few seconds.
2. Support for modern JavaScript.
   The modernised build tools allow you to write modern (ES2015+) JavaScript in all JS files, not only in JSX files. This lets you take advantage of a lot of useful JavaScript language constructs throughout your configuration.

Sounds good? Providing you these benefits will impact your configuration and the way you define it. Most notably, we will stop supporting AMD modules in favour of native JavaScript modules, which are standardised in ES2015. A good starting point to learn more about them is Google’s primer on JavaScript modules. We understand this change requires an upgrade effort from your end, and we plan to support you by offering an optional automated conversion.

If you’re interested in trying out an early version, please let us know. When we are close to release and feel like things are stable enough, we’ll publish an early version and give you a heads up. If you have any questions about these upcoming changes, please direct them at team@fontoxml.com, and we’ll answer them as soon as possible. We’ll provide you with more in-depth details closer to release.

We believe these changes pave the way for future improvements and optimisations to Fonto’s build tools, and we’re looking forward to providing them to you in future releases.