#emberaddons

Let’s say you’re browsing through EmberAddons or EmberObserver looking for some new projects that might benefit your application. You stumble across two similar looking addons, Ember-Simple-Auth and Ember-CLI-Simple-Auth. Based on the names alone, what do you think the difference is? Some of you may already know about these projects, but let’s say you didn’t. Originally, Ember-Simple-Auth was not an addon at all, and Ember-CLI-Simple-Auth was the addon wrapper that allowed developers to include the main project in their applications. This could be reasonably deduced by the chosen names at one point.

However, now both projects are published as addons; Ember-Simple-Auth supersedes Ember-CLI-Simple-Auth, which is now deprecated after the main project was converted to a full addon. Is that confusing? Maybe, but I think that was a better choice than re-publishing under the Ember-CLI-Simple-Auth name (leaving aside the breaking changes for people using the old packages). Let’s look at a few more examples to see what I mean:

Ember-CLI-Deploy

Ember-CLI-Font-Awesome

Ember-CLI-Autoprefixer

Ember-CLI-Release

Ember-Bootstrap

Ember-Table

Ember-Paper

What can we take away from these names? The obvious difference is that some of them are prefixed with “Ember-CLI-”, and others just “Ember-”. Does that indicate any commonalities between them? I’d say yes, definitely. 

The “Ember-CLI-” addons all share a primary goal of adding functionality to your app during builds or from the command line. For example, Ember-CLI-Deploy and Ember-CLI-Release both provide `ember` commands, whereas Ember-CLI-Font-Awesome and Ember-CLI-Autoprefixer are wrappers for third-party code to be included and run with the app.

The “Ember-” addons instead aim to provide you with abstractions of reusable Ember objects that might otherwise live within your app. Ember-Bootstrap and Ember-Paper both bring in stylesheets for UI frameworks, and all three provide components to utilize in your projects.

Confusing Addon Names

The point I’m trying to get at is that these addons all use their names meaningfully. This isn’t a new idea, by any means, but there are still projects out there that make the above associations less distinct. I’m not making a dig at the authors of those addons, many of which are quite wonderfully built, but let me show you a few instances:

Ember-CLI-Materialize

Ember-CLI-Notifications

Ember-CLI-Simple-Validation

Ember-Browserify

Ember-Sprite

In these cases, the first three addons all primarily provide components, helpers, services, etc to be consumed within your Ember application. Conversely, Ember-Browserify and Ember-Sprite both affect Broccoli’s tree processing to compile files for your app at build time. Any conclusions we had made about naming patterns previously are now shattered by encountering an array of projects that defy those assumptions. To be fair though, some of this naming confusion comes from a time when Ember CLI wasn’t the default path for building Ember Apps, so there are many older addons that carried the “Ember-CLI-” prefix as a way to differentiate themselves from Ember packages that were not addons at all. Nowadays, addons are the blessed approach to integrating with an Ember app, so it’s time for a new tactic.

What I suggest is that we lay out some guidelines for naming addons in order to improve the future ecosystem and make it easier for new developers to tell at a glance what kind of addon they’re looking at. Some of us have already discussed this idea in the past, but still I feel that its understanding and adoption is not widespread. I’d like to propose three main “categories” at the moment, though I’m sure with community input we can find even more useful classifications.

Ember-CLI- Addons

Addons that primarily deal with Ember-CLI as opposed to Ember directly should be prefixed with the “Ember-CLI-” convention. This includes addons that augment the build (such as linters or preprocessors) and those that add new CLI commands, to name a few. Some great examples of these kinds of addons are:

Ember-CLI-ESLint

Ember-CLI-JSDoc

Ember-CLI-SASS

Ember-Data- Addons

Addons whose goal is to provide data adapters for various APIs or other functionality specific to Ember-Data should be prefixed with “Ember-Data-”. This makes it easy to spot addons that will enhance your data access layer, such as these:

Ember-Data-GitHub

Ember-Data-Route

Ember-Data.Model-Fragments

Ember- Addons

Finally, addons that provide objects that will live in your applications themselves belong in the “Ember-” category. This includes projects with components, services, helpers, and so on; essentially, any addon that primarily adds files to the `addon/` and `app/` directories deserves this classification. A few of my favorites that follow this pattern are:

Ember-CPM

Ember-Intl

Ember-Moment

Other Addon Types

The Ember Community has proven to be prolific, if nothing else. To date, there are over 1400 known Addons in Ember Land, accompanied by hundreds of articles, blog posts, videos, and podcasts explaining how to use them. The problem is, many of these addons are incomplete or outdated, and the web content along with it. Fear not, however! There are many great resources available to help you in your Ember journeys.

Finding Great Addons

Any time you want to build a new feature in your Ember app, whether it’s authentication, modal dialogs, and something totally crazy, there’s a good chance someone’s already had to build it. If you’re lucky, they were generous enough to release their work to the Open Source world as an Ember-CLI Addon. So before you go digging into the bowels of test mocking hell, stop and wonder if a solution already exists.

Now of course you could go crazy trying to scour GitHub for Addons day and night, so some helpful folks have created a few sites to make that easier. Ember Observer is an amazing resource that categorizes every addon that’s been published to npm, providing an easy discovery tool for any type of feature. Additionally, the site scores each addon based on a number of criteria, giving you an at-a-glance look at the quality of the project. If the score is less than 5/10, chances are it’s not worth your time just yet.

Ember Observer even has a Maintainer view, which lets you see every addon created by the same author. This can be very useful when you find a great project and want to know what other addons they might have built to go with it. Huge props to Katie Gengler, Pete Gengler, and Louis Simons for putting this project together!

Another great site is Ember Addons from Giovanni Collazo, featuring quick search functionality for addons. This project allows you to easily sort addons by name, owner, and last updated, as well as the score given it by Ember Observer! If you want to view the top addons of the entire Ember community, this is the site to use.

Ember News: Daily, Weekly, Whenever

Discovering addons is only part of the solution, however. There are always many things going on in the Ember community, and it’s hard to keep track of it all yourself. Fortunately, a number of great sites have been created to keep you up-to-date on the latest goings-on.

If you want the latest Ember happenings delivered right to your (digital) doorstep with minimal effort, look no further! Ember Weekly, curated by Owain Williams, is an email newsletter containing “the latest in Ember.js news, tips & code delivered directly to your inbox”. Yup, it’s that easy. Simply subscribe and you’ll be up-to-date on the most important developments in Ember every week. You can even browse their website for past issues to catch up on what you missed! Ember Weekly has run for 123 issues and doesn’t look to let up the steam anytime soon.

Next on our list is the EmberUp! blog by Ben Holmes and Fabian Becker. This relatively recent addition to the community has put up sixteen posts in the last six weeks, a more than decent pace to start. Their topics range from introducing useful addons such as ember-simple-auth to providing DOM rendering optimization tips. These guys definitely know their stuff, and they’ve contributed to a few addons themselves as well. Check it out!

Maybe curated content isn’t your thing, and you want a wider scope on what’s going down in Ember. Fortunately for you, Uģis Ozols has built Ember Flare, which is, in his own words, “a community driven place where everyone can share link(s) with a short description to content related to all things Ember”. This is great because even you can help expose great Ember content via Flare, highlighting your favorite posts, videos, or otherwise from around the web. Heck, maybe you even came to this post from that site in the first place!

Plenty of other Ember developers have their own blogs as well (including the one you’re on now, so subscribe below!), so be sure to check out your favorite devs to see what they’ve been up to lately.

Radio Free Ember

If you don’t like getting your Ember fix in a text format, then maybe these podcast sites will do the trick! Ember Weekend, the brainchild of Chase McCarthy and Jonathan Jackson, hosts a podcast each weekend where they discuss addons, tips & tricks, conferences, and other juicy Ember tidbits. As a bonus, each podcast on their site is broken up into segments so you can easily skip to just the parts you care about most.

Is once a week two much for you? Then maybe you’ll enjoy the twice-a-month release schedule of Ember Land, brought to you by Dockyard’s own Dan McClain and the beer-worthy Ember Core member Robert Jackson. If you want to keep abreast of what’s going on at the heart of Ember, these podcasts are your ticket.

The only site in today’s post that doesn’t feature the word “Ember” still serves up plenty of Ember-related content for your perusal. Frontside the Podcast is hosted by Charles Lowell and Brandon Hays of The Frontside, the team that brought you `emberx-select`. These guys discuss a lot of Ember and even go farther afield into general development topics that you’ll find equally relevant. They’ve also done a great job of bringing in frequent special guests from the Ember community, including the likes of Robert Jackson, Trek Glowacki, Tom Dale, Yehuda Katz, Alex Matchneer, and more!

There’s no better way to keep up with the fast-moving Ember world than these resources. Whether you’re a veteran Embereño or a brand-new Emberite, you’re sure find plenty of useful material to improve your application and find out what’s coming next. If you get stuck, though, be sure to check out Ember Library #2 for great tutorials and help resources to unblock you at every turn.