Introducing Slack JS 9.0.0 🎉

Super stoked to share the latest version of our JS client for the Slack Web API! You can find the source code here and the npm distribution here.

Speed is 🔑

Apps built for Slack by their nature are real time. All facets of speed are critical factors for creating a great user experience. And with performance as our guide I am very pleased to say we support the entire Slack Web API in a 7kb (not gzip’d) payload that has been solidly tested for all LTS versions of Node and modern evergreen browsers.

Being so tiny means this library loads super fast which makes it perfect for AWS Lambda and browser-based applications where cold start responsiveness is critical.

Modern JS 📟💬

Building apps on Slack has matured a tonne since 1.0.0, which shipped in September of 2016. Between evergreen browsers and Node 8.x about to go LTS it was time to open up the interface support for more modern async primitives now that they have suitably matured.

Modern features JS are now well enough supported the library no longer requires a transpile step to publish.

⚙ Tip: https://arc.codes sets up a Slack Events API endpoint in minutes on AWS API Gateway and Lambda

Install 🚀

npm i slack --save

New shiny 💖

Code now dynamically generates itself at runtime using api.json instead of statically compiling from it
Async choice: all methods now will return a Promise if a Node style errback isn’t passed
class based instances can be created where all methods have token prebound

Upgrading? Read on! ➡

Things that stay the same 👯‍♂️

Code is still generated from the Slack Web API documentation so the method signatures match their published docs precisely
The original “old school” functional stateless Web API with Node style errback interface remains the same (as it has since 1.0.0!)

Things being removed 👋

web.rtm.client which wraps the Slack RTM API has been removed; we recommend using the Slack Events API for ingesting real time events
web.api.client has been removed in favor of treating slack as a constructor function

Changes for Contributors 🍄

This library is largely maintained by begin.com and missions.ai Slapp devs. This release means an 87% decrease in memory footprint for users of this lib! 🏎💨
The transpile step is gone, so generating is faster because builds are faster, which makes tests faster and the dep tree lighter
Currently only two dependencies remain: util.promisify and tiny-json-http and we have the goal to move that number to zero while retaining total API stability

Thanks to the Slack dev community, and contributors and in particular
and for reviewing the code and this post.