Canonical ember template compiling

There are a lot of packages floating around on NPM and Github for pre-compiling Ember templates. There are a lot of problems afflicting these packages.

  • Don’t work properly.
  • Use out of date version of Ember &/or Handlebars.
  • Use out of sync version of Ember & Handlebars (this is confusing on its own).

I’ve only had consistent, reliable success with two packages - ember-rails and grunt-ember-templates. Unfortunately, both of these pretty much require that I commit to using either Rails or Grunt for my project.

My suggestion is that there be a canonical NPM package release based off of the internal template compiler. This way, other packages could standardize their compilation workflows off of this base, rather than everyone inventing their own.

Thoughts?

@joliss has been doing some investigation into improving Ember package distribution and the build process. It’s definitely something we want to work on.

I think part of the challenge might be to make sure that the Ember+Handlebars versions in the browser exactly match the ones in the precompiler. @stefan.penner and I are working on some stuff to make the build process better, but it’s still not entirely clear to me how we can make sure that the client-side and server-side Ember versions are the same.

It’s definitely something worth solving.

Keeping Ember up-to-date in NPM would be a start. Last I checked only RC2 was available through NPM. If Ember was current, compilers could list Ember and Handlebars as a dependency and then use Ember’s compiler instead of rolling their own code. Or copy/pasting from Github.