JavaScript upgrade will nix object observation feature
The plan, offered by Object.observe proponent Adam Klein on the ECMAScript discussion archives site, says circumstances surrounding the technology have changed, making it unfeasible.
Object-observe has been slated for inclusion in ECMAScript 7, also known as ECMAScript 2016. Klein wants to withdraw Object.observe from the TC39 committee, which has jurisdiction over ECMAScript, the technical specification underlying JavaScript. He also said he'll remove support for it from Google's V8 JavaScript engine.
"Over three years ago, Rafael Weinstein, Erik Arvidsson, and I set out to design and implement what we believed to be the primitive underlying the data-binding system of MDV (model-driven views)," Klein said in a blog post. "We prototyped an implementation in a branch of V8, then got agreement from the V8 team to build a real version upstream, while pushing Object.observe (O.o) as a part of the upcoming ES7 standard and working with the Polymer team to build their data-binding system on top of O.o.
"Three years later, the world has changed in a variety of ways," he said. While data-binding frameworks such as Ember and Angular showed interest, it was difficult to see how they could evolve their existing model to match O.o. "Polymer rewrote from the ground up for its 1.0 release, and in that rebuilding did not utilize O.o. And React's processing model, which tries to avoid the mutable state inherent in data-binding systems, has become quite popular on the Web."
Klein recommends developers who have experimented with Object.observe instead consider a polyfill such as MaxArt2501/object-observe or a wrapper library such as polymer/observe-js, for observing changes in JavaScript data.