I am totally new to Ember (and pretty much javascript), but I think this is an example of a use condition I was asking about here . My take would be your toolbar for example would define a delegate interface, and when you instantiate the toolbar, you pass a reference to the delegate (it might just be the parent component) then the delegate would communicate with the other components that need to know about toolbar events. This way the toolbar is completely independent and re-usable, he just needs a delegate. As I said I am really new here so hopefully this is not totally off base.