blog:Announcing FreeSewing v4

FreeSewing version 4 was released today, and we have migrated to our new website too.

This new major version of FreeSewing, version 4, has been in the works for a while, and I really wanted to get it out the door before sending out our Spring edition newsletter, so that’s exactly what I did.

As this is a major version, there are breaking changes, but we’ve really kept it to a minimum. There’s only one real breaking change:

• FreeSewing now requires NodeJS 20 or newer

In other words, we’ve dropped support for NodeJS 18, which will reach end of life at the end of next month.

A lot of work went into this new major release, especially in the realm of our frontend code, where we made a huge effort to make it more maintainable. This is the kind of thing that mostly happens under the hood, but will allow us to increase the project’s volatility and shorten our (non-major) release cycle.

What this means is that everything’s changed, and nothing has changed. I’ve compared it to your favorite restaurant moving across the street. It’s a different building, different kitchen, different everything. But your favorite waitress is still there serving that same food you’ve know and love.

That, in a nutshell, is FreeSewing v4.

👋 Bye bye Vercel/NextJS

We have been using NextJS for several years now for the FreeSewing frontends. However, as I mentioned in an earlier edition of this newsletter, Vercel (the company behind NextJS) has revoked their sponsorship. This was nothing against FreeSewing, they’ve revoked all open source plans, but without their sponsorships, the cost of hosting our websites on Vercel is rather steep, and it was not sustainable for us to stay with them.

Furthermore, Vercel is also increasingly tying NextJS to their hosted offering, making it harder to just go elsewhere.

Since documentation is a critical (and large) part of both our website for makers and developers, we’ve decided to migrate to Docusaurus, which is highly optimized for documentation, but flexible enough that we can still do all the more advanced stuff that we need.

To improve maintainability and facilitate code reuse between our websites and new studio, we’ve abstracted all of our frontend logic into various components in our new @freesewing/react package which now underpins all our frontends.

This was a huge effort, and we are lagging behind with developer documentation, which is something which we’ll work on going forward.

Apart from that, I’m certain there will be some rough edges, but things should just work and if not, make sure to let us know.