Hello fellow racletteers!

This week brings a fresh release across the core packages and a few important ecosystem updates.

A lot of the work focused on performance improvements, developer experience, and foundational features that will support upcoming capabilities like the modular permission system and the typesafe router.

Let’s take a look at what melted into the codebase.

This week we released version 0.1.21 for all core packages.

A small but important improvement:

Route parameters that clearly represent booleans or numbers are now automatically parsed before reaching widget props. Thanks Javascript

Example:

/dashboard?compact=true&page=2

Previously everything arrived as strings.
Now true becomes a boolean and 2 becomes a number.

This is currently an intermediate solution until the upcoming typesafe router lands.

Several global performance optimizations landed this release.

Nothing flashy here — just the kind of quiet engineering work that makes racletteJS applications run smoother and scale better.

Backend routes of the corePlugin now use a new middleware:

checkPermission

This prepares the backend for the upcoming modular permission system, which will allow much more granular access control across racletteJS applications.

All widget components now receive a new prop:

onAllWidgetsReady

This function is triggered once all widgets within the current composition have rendered content to the DOM.

This enables new patterns such as:

A new global concept has been introduced:

Work Sessions

These allow you to share a document with users who are not authenticated.

This opens up use cases such as:

Expect this feature to evolve further as collaboration features grow.

racletteJS now supports rate limiting out of the box.

Configuration is available via:

raclette.config → backend config

Under the hood this uses:

@fastify/rate-limit

This adds an important security and abuse protection layer for racletteJS backend APIs.

Workbench also received updates in 0.1.21.

You can now configure the widgetId directly in the composition layout screen.

This improves:

The WidgetList.vue component (used in the widget layout editor) received a new design.

New capabilities include:

This makes large widget libraries much easier to navigate.

Development has started on a new plugin:

Repository:
https://gitlab.com/raclettejs/plugins/nodemailer

The plugin will provide email delivery capabilities for racletteJS applications using Nodemailer. We will also provide a way for you to design you mailtemplates within the plugin config in the workbench.

Typical use cases will include:

It’s still early, but the groundwork has begun.

We’ve upgraded the core dependency containers across the racletteJS ecosystem to their latest stable versions.

This includes updates for services such as:

These upgrades bring performance improvements, better long-term support, and compatibility with future racletteJS features.

If you are running racletteJS applications in production — such as the OpenStack Billing Dashboard — we recommend following the MongoDB migration guide before upgrading.

Guide:
https://gitlab.com/raclettejs/core-dev/-/blob/main/mongo-update.md?ref_type=heads

The migration is a bit tedious, because MongoDB requires stepping through multiple intermediate upgrade versions. The guide walks you through the process.

If you choose not to follow the migration path, be aware that you will loose all data stored in the database, such as:

Yes.

There are no known security risks in staying on MongoDB 5 for now, so upgrading is not mandatory.

However, MongoDB 8 provides a significant performance boost, which we strongly recommend taking advantage of once possible.

Good news for all core Contributors!:

The racletteJS monorepo setup finally behaves the way we want it to.

While the developer experience is still being refined, the core architecture is now working reliably.

One area we're currently improving is simultaneous development of applications, plugins, and the core framework.

If you want to do this already, check out the guide:

https://gitlab.com/raclettejs/raclettejs/-/blob/main/guides/HOWTO-simultaneously-develop-apps-and-core.md?ref_type=heads

Expect further improvements here — good tooling is essential for a healthy open-source ecosystem.

This week’s release focuses heavily on foundation work:

These kinds of releases might look small at first glance, but they quietly unlock a lot of future capabilities for racletteJS applications and platform deployments.

And as always — more cheesy things are cooking behind the scenes.

Until the next melt 🧀

The Cheesy People