The primary driver for the PatternFly 4 release is to enable Angular 2 development through the re-factor of our Angular 1.x directives into Angular 1.5+ components.  These components can be used in a “downgraded” Angular 2 application.  All directives have been converted to components, except the pfRemainingCharsCount, pfFocused, pfValidation, and pfFixedAccordion directives.  We have provided a Angular 2 quickstart that can be used as a starting point for your own PatternFly Angular 2 applications.

With PatternFly 4, we’ve refactored our Angular modules to enable development of Angular-PatternFly applications without bringing in the jQuery dependency.  To take advantage of this, include the patternfly-settings.js file from the PatternFly dependency, rather than patternfly.js.  More details can be found in the associated Github Pull Request.

New common component work has landed in PatternFly 4 with the introduction of the Angular-PatternFly Table View component.  The table view component leverages the angular-datables port of the datatables.net library we are using in PatternFly 4.  It brings the highly requested table view pattern implementation to Angular.  Check out the Angular-PatternFly docs for more details on using the table view in your Angular applications.

We’ve refactored the monolithic patternfly.js file into a number of separate source files with this PatternFly 4 release.  The goal was to better enable developers to locate functionality and contribute to PatternFly.  The individual files are still packaged into a single file at build time, mimicking the PatternFly 3 distribution, as such there is no migration step required in this regard for your applications.

Ruby is no longer required to build and contribute to the PatternFly project.  Ruby was required due to our use of jekyll to provide code samples that are used in both the development of PatternFly components, as well as live examples on the patternfly.org site.  Having to install ruby and the associated gems however presented a source of frustration and an impediment to contribution from our javascript developer community.

To overcome this hurdle, we’ve implemented a javascript tool to render our jekyll test pages using the liquid-node library.  The full jekyll build is however still available for those who have ruby installed.  See the README for instructions on toggling the javascript/ruby build for PatternFly.

PatternFly 5 development has continued concurrent to the Patternfly 4 effort.  We are planning a 5.0.0-alpha.1 release in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned for blogs and announcements detailing what we’ve been up to with PatternFly 5.