Is Marko framework active?

Question

I've looked a the Marko framework from eBay, and it looks very promising. Actually pretty awesome. But the activity around the project seems very quiet. No videos, presentations etc on youtube the last year, very few if any component/UI collections etc. I see there are a few commits on github and smaller upgrades, but other than that the buzz around the project seems very quiet.

Few places to get help other than a single forum that seams nearly vacant. I've tried to get help on a few questions, but with no luck.

Is this a framework worth looking into at this time? Anybody know of any new major version coming up soon?

Answer 1

One of the core Marko maintainers here.

Thanks for the question. I know it is one that has been asked a few times now in the Marko community.

Here is a portion of one of my responses to this in our gitter chatroom.

Marko is still under development. We are currently working hard on making migration tooling to help many teams at eBay upgrade to the latest version of Marko. We are also laying the ground work for faster migrations and upgrades in the future. In tandem we are looking at what Marko 5 will look like and the main experiment around that is happening in https://github.com/marko-js/x. The TLDR of it is to switch our compiler to piggy back off of babel which will allow us to do many things including: Sourcemap support, es module/modern js output, support for modern js inside Marko templates (eg async generators), support for other syntaxes supported by babel including typescript and many other smaller features. It will also allow us to drastically reduce the size of our compiler and move much faster in the future. We do not currently have a timeline on this but have made good progress. Thanks for your patience!

To further answer your questions:

1. Yes, the community is small. This is a hard problem to solve. Our current plan to help us increase adoption is to both simplify the language, making it easier to learn, and to make integrations with other tools easier. At the same time we are working to modernize and simplify the codebase to hopefully make it easier for others to contribute.
2. The best place to chat is the gitter chatroom mentioned above. It's quiet at times, and we can't always help quickly, but we try our best.
3. Finally the last question is tricky as it depends on what you are building. Marko is heavily optimized for server side rendering which is important for us. On this front there are many features not found in other frameworks including split components and true streaming rendering with out of order flushing. One of the other benefits of Marko is that (since we have full control over the language and it's output) there is very little boiler plate and we are able to do optimizations not possible in most other frameworks.

I think at this very point in time Marko is a bit behind its peers on the integration and community front which can make adoption hard. We do plan on taking a more coordinated effort at addressing this though in the near future.