We've been working long and hard....and are simply overflowing with excitement that we've finally made it to the Beta 1 release of Aurelia! We're staging this release over the course of the week. Today, we're launching the libraries themselves.

Beta 1 is Here

Almost 1 year ago, I (Rob) started writing the code for Aurelia. Now we're at Beta, and a lot has changed...a lot of very exicting things have been happening.

Team

I spent the end of 2014 and the first couple months of 2015 seeding the codebase of Aurelia with what I thought cast a powerful vision for the future of web programming. Since then, things have taken off. Aurelia isn't just a me. It hasn't been for many months. We've got an amazing team of about 18 developers, designers and technology evangelists. Together the team has taken my initial ideas and brought them to life. A big thanks goes out to everyone on the team who stepped up to put all the hard work into making this release possible. It's been great working with all of you and I'm excited about what we've got planned for the future.

Traction

Aurelia has taken off in an amazing way. We're approaching 6,000 stars on GitHub and have one of the largest and most active Gitter dev chats in the world with over 2,400 developers discussing Aurelia and over 180,000 messages.

Aurelia is being adopted today by major enterprises, large international organizations and businesses of every size. It's being used in healthcare, insurance, finance, entertainment, technology, developer tools, LOB, gaming and more.

And all that's happened in only 9 months...

Community

In addition to the core 18-developer team, we've had another 220+ contributors to the project, with an average of 20-25 new contributors every month. This amazing community has submitted and helped us close almost 1,400 issues and almost 1,000 pull requests.

From the bottom of our hearts, we want to say thank you to everyone who contributed, no matter how large or small (yes, even thanks to the Google guy who fixed the missing semi-colon;))

Learning Resources

Today, you can watch K. Scott Allen . However, there are two more courses, dedicated to Aurelia coming in the next months and more coming which will be using Aurelia to demonstrate other technologies (such as data integration and elastic search).

We've got three major tech book publishers we've lined up with authors. So, you'll be seeing Aurelia books available sometime next year. We're also connecting Lynda.com and other online video training sites with competent authors and core team members. MSDN magazine has serveral articles touching on Aurelia too, thanks to the fabulous Julie Lerman .

Looking to get a quick video-fix? Here's a video I recorded with Channel 9 a couple weeks back. It shows some things you may not have seen before:

Lots of great content is on the way!

What's in this release anyway?

Last week we released a pre-beta, so if you have updated to that, you shouldn't need to worry about any breaking changes. Having the pre-release gave us some time to address a few additional issues and helped to make our official Beta much more solid.

As of this Beta, we are now releasing all libraries officially through NPM . We will still continue to release through GitHub and to the Bower repository, but our JSPM configuration will be pointing at NPM. This will make it easier for continuous integration, use of our libraries on the server and future scenarios such as server-side rendering that we are planning. It will also put an end to the pesky GitHub rate limit problem.