Version 2.5 of Blaze has been published. It is a comparably smaller release to 2.4, but it is an important step towards Blaze’s future.
Changes
Work on Blaze 2.6 has already started and will most likely include removal of deprecated code to coincide with the same work in Meteor 2.3, so make sure that you are not using any of those old APIs or variables.
Hey, this is awesome! I don’t use Blaze anymore, but have fond memories of it. Loved it truly, before I did the switch to React. I hope this is also a major step towards removing underscore from Meteor completely, so we have a chance to switch to lodash on a project level (two of these libraries do not make any sense, so I still stick to underscore).
Removing underscore is an ongoing process among few others long running “upgrade” themes across all Meteor projects. If anyone has a bit of time pick a package that uses underscore and remove it from there.
Agree- Dependency for specific package or library wouldn’t be a good choice for Meteor world. And I hope we could remove jQuery dependecy in someday-
Great job!-
Is jquery still required?
What are you actually using to replace it? Copies of the underscore functions or your own implementations?
For underscore either native functions or getting specific functions from npm instead of the entire package.
The removal of jQuery is a future effort but it’s one of the bigger challenges, since it’s deeply integrated into Blaze. However, there will be a solution 
Yeah it still makes some confusion for some situations although it could be solved by modulation way. But would be better if we could remove dependencies-
I think removal of jQuery is Blaze 3.0 thing.
On a second thought: Is this even desirable (for Blaze)? I mean, when I switched from pure frontend dev to Meteor, I actually loved the simplicity, and I think part of it was the easy APIs provided by jQuery I was already familiar with. If jQuery (which is a beast, I know) was ripped out, what would replace it, without breaking existing code?
The goal is that it is not going to remove any functionality. For many things in jQuery there are also now native alternatives as well, but all of this will be part of the discussion and research.
We still use it and this is fantastic news
jQuery is good. We can use it still if we add it but the integrated jQuery causes some dependency problems with some 3rd packages or libraries. So there were many requests to remove it a couple of years ago.
But I think the js modulation has solved already by itself from the jQuery version collisions.