Intellisense for Ember injected services - ember.js

I am a bit frustrated that there doesn't seem any decent "Ember intellisense" available in any common IDE (like VS Code, Webstorm, Atom). By "intellisense" I mean that, as long as my Ember project is a standard Ember CLI project with all the common Service, Helper folders etc., and I inject e.g. a service using myService: service(), this would be recognized by Intellisense and, after typing this.myService, I would see all functions in the service. Also, if I Ctrl+Click on the function in this.myService.myFunction(), I would expect to navigate to the definition of myFunction.
For other frameworks, such as Angular, there are plugins which support all this.
Is it really the case that I have to use "Find in Files" to find the definition of a service function?
Does anyone know of a way or tool which I might have missed, and which would support this scenario? Note that I don't speak of bare-bones features such as switching between router/controller/template, but of real intellisense for custom objects.

The situation is indeed not yet great. There are a couple things that do help quite a bit:
Using TypeScript via the ember-cli-typescript project will unlock a lot of these benefits for you. (Full disclosure: I'm a maintainer.)
There's a community-driven IntelliJ plugin which is pretty good, intellij-emberj; it has a fair number of those features and it's kept up to date by a member of the Ember CLI team.
There's a suite of VS Code plugins, including a language server, which gives a fair bit of it.
(There's certainly a lot more to be done here, and unfortunately none of the IDE developers seem interested in providing native support themselves, so it has fallen to the community to build it all.)

You can have a look at various code editors and plugins that ember community suggests,
dev tools
I wonder the same way as you, realising that there is no IDE have particularly good support for Ember.
I'm using Webstorm community version for the past 6 months, but I don’t think it’s the ideal EmberJS IDE. I wonder if there is an IDE which provides some kind of intellisense/code completion/helper suggestions.
Ember has always seemed to be a very IDE-like framework, so it surprises me that no-one here (ember community, IDE developers) is building any clever plugins for IDEA or Atom or VS Code.

VS Code plugins:
emberjs.vscode-ember - Langserver for VSCode.
lifeart.vscode-ember-unstable - Unofficial Canary Version.

Related

Ember appkit - debugging

We are currently using requirejs/backbone for development and firebug for debugging. We are thinking of moving to Ember and using ember appkit.
I noticed that because of the new ES6 javascript modules, the application needs to be pre-compiled into a single javascript file app.js.
I am concerned that this will make it difficult to debug problems because you are dealing with a massive single file instead of small ones that we have at the moment and can easily find in firebug.
Has this been an issue for people, are there any good solutions?
As kingpin2k mentions, Ember App Kit has been effectively superseded by Ember-CLI. I would recommend looking into that. Depending on your needs and planning, Ember-CLI may or may not be suitable for your situation. Some people have successfully put Ember-CLI apps in production, but this is brand new technology, so caveat emptor.
Ember-CLI provides a build system based on Broccoli that will transpile ES6-modules, compact the output into a single Javascript file, and lots more. Ember-CLI is still under heavy development, but is already shaping up quite nicely. In my opinion, the clean code organization and fast Broccoli build are really quite awesome.
Modern browsers such as Firefox and Chrome come with an integrated debugger that will show you the original source when source maps are supplied. This will eventually be provided to the browser in Ember-CLI projects as well when you run the development server. However, this functionality is currently incomplete. It is possible to get some source map support in Ember-CLI now, have a look at this issue.
In the mean time, there are more ways to debug code of course, and I suspect that before proper source map support lands in Ember-CLI/Broccoli, liberal use of console logging and such may be sufficient. Running Ember-CLI's live-reload development server means that when you change and save a file in your project, the results will be shown almost instantaneously in the browser; the Broccoli build is blazing fast.
Keep in mind that minifying and combining all Javascript code into a single output file is a common approach in single page application frameworks such as Ember, Angular, and Backbone. Debugging these applications with breakpoints and such will happen more and more through the browser's debug tools in combination with source maps.
Update
By now the Ember core team actively recommends Ember-CLI. It is quite awesome.

Django A/B Split Testing Packages (None I've found are well-documented and up-to-date.)

There are two main schools of thought for doing A/B (Split) Testing:
Javascript-based solutions such as Optimizely, Google Analytics Content Experiments.
Server-side solutions such as Django-AB, Splango, and django-lean. (Also, writing your own.)
My understanding is that Javascript-based solutions are spectacular for "which color button converts better," but not so great for switching out entire page layouts, and completely unworkable for trying out large functional changes such as the sequence of pages in a funnel.
That leads me towards a server-side solution. I'm not crazy about coding my own, and will do so only if there is no other option. I'm trying to add value by improving the core functionality of my site, not by creating a better split-testing framework.
The Django apps I've found for split testing are various mixtures of unmaintained, undocumented, documented incorrectly, and incompatible with Django 1.5. This surprises me, because the Django and Python communities seem to have a strong focus on good documentation. I'm also very surprised that none of the testing frameworks I've tried has been compatible with Django 1.5 -- is testing not as core a part of the philosophy in the Django/Python world as it is in Rails?
Here's what I've found:
Splango https://github.com/shimon/Splango -- Not compatible with Django 1.5 (although most compatibility bugs I found were trivial to fix). Largely un-touched since October 2010, except for a fix August 2012 which claims to make sure templates get included in the install. Since templates don't get included in the install when Splango is installed via PyPI, either the fix didn't work or didn't get submitted to PyPI. Documentation is largely accurate, but doesn't completely cover how to set up tests and get reports. It tells you how to configure the template to gather the data, but there appears to be additional steps required in the admin interface which are completely undocumented, and I'm not sure I've done them properly.
Django-lean. Original at https://bitbucket.org/akoha/django-lean has not been updated since July 2010. There is an apparently "blessed" fork at https://github.com/anandhenry2002/django-lean which has not been changed since May 2012, when it was copied over from the original. The original's documentation is incorrect in ways that make following the examples impossible. (Though you can probably muddle your way through, as I did.) The new version's documentation has formatting problems that make it difficult to read on github. (This appears to be because it's the unchanged documentation from the old project, and BitBucket syntax doesn't work on Github.) The django-lean Google Group has not had a message since July 2012.
django-mini-lean https://github.com/DanAncona/django-mini-lean -- Updated as recently as February 2013, but undocumented.
Leaner - https://bitbucket.org/brianjinwright/leaner -- Last updated July 2012, and no docs.
Django-AB -- Last updated May 2009. Is not a package, and can't be installed via PIP or PyPI. After placing the checkout in my django app folder (and renaming the folder to ab) and following the installation instructions, I get an error loading the template loader that I have not tracked down further.
So far Splango appears to be the winner, as I've actually been able to get it more-or-less working (by manually installing the templates, and then editing them to fix Django 1.5 incompatibilities).
Can anyone point me to anything I've missed?
You have missed this app : https://github.com/mixcloud/django-experiments + https://github.com/disqus/gargoyle/
And then there's waffle: http://waffle.readthedocs.org/
It's simple, updated, maintained, but not very feature rich, it doesn't have any analytics/reporting stuff integrated. But then again, google analytics or mixpanel type of service is better for this.
I first looked at Django-AB and that is almost what I wanted, but I couldn't get it to work either. After looking at django-experiments and deciding I didn't want to mess around with redis yet, I decided to roll my own. I've tried to package it up nicely and make it easy to use for the beginner. It's super basic.
https://github.com/crobertsbmw/RobertsAB
You can swap out entirely different page layouts with Google Analytics Experiments (their default experiment setup will redirect users to a different URL for each variation you have), although in general its much easier to interpret why something is more successful if you test smaller things against each other.
You are right that testing different funnels and user flows against each other using Google Analytics would require a lot of manual setup; although theoretically you could do it by swapping out different links and tracking your users with UTM campaigns.
For smaller A/B tests within the same page, I ended up using Google Analytics Experiments and writing a custom Django CMS plugin for adding a few variant options to a template, which queries the Google Analytics API and displays the correct variant using Javascript.

How to write modular Ember.js apps

Is there any guidance on how to write modular Ember.js apps? I have seen Tom Dale's position on AMD here so I am not going to force fit AMD on to the framework (as some have attempted here). It appears that Ember internally uses bpm/spade. Is that a reasonable approach to modularize Ember apps too? Any samples using this approach?
P.S. The getbpm.org site seems to be down which makes it difficult to learn about it. There is a github page but it refers to the site for install instructions.
BPM in it's current form is no longer supported by the core team, but is community supported. The only build tools they are officially providing support for is rake-pipeline. However, BPM does still work and it works well (I still use it with my projects). For info on how to use it see this: https://github.com/ud3323/bpm/wiki/Using-BPM-with-Ember. You may want to use my fork of bpm too. I've merged in Joe West's support for a proxy middleware.
There is also community build tools for node.js called ember-runner which looks promising as well.
As for using rake-pipeline. Look at the AssetFile on the emberjs projects to see how must be configured using rake-pipeline and rake-pipeline-web-filters. Also, take a look at the answers to this question on StackOverflow (especially Yehuda's). You may also find this gist helpful as well.
Try Ember App Kit - maybe it would help you.
I have played a bit with Rails, so for me, creating a rails 3.2 app was the easiest way to achieve this. So if you don't mind using rails as a back-end, I this might suit you.
Perhaps ember-tools could help:
https://github.com/rpflorence/ember-tools
I am novice still I found yeoman and ember-generator useful. In future you might need to add tests , mock rest calls you can easily npm install sinonjs and npm install ic-ajax

Is anyone actually successfully using MSTest across the team?

I've been using MSTest so far for my unit-tests, and found that it would sometimes randomly break my builds for no reason. The builds would fail in VS but compile fine in MSBuild - with error like 'option strict does not allow IFoo to cast to type IFoo'. I believe I have finally fixed it, but after the bug coming back and struggling to make it go away again, and little help from MS, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I also noticed when looking at this forum and other blogs and such, that most people are using NUnit, xUnit, or MBUnit.. We are on VS2008 at work BTW.. So now I am looking to explore other options..
I'm working on moving our team to start doing TDD and real unit testing and have some training planned, but first would like to come up with a set of standard tools & best practices. To this end I've been looking online to come up with the right infrastructure for both a build server and dev machines...I was looking at the typemock website as I've heard great things about their mocking framework, and noticed that it seems like they promote MSTest, and even have some links of people moving TO MSTest from NUnit..
This is making me re-think my decision.. so I guess I'm asking - is anyone using MSTest as part of their TDD infrastructure? Any known limitiations it has, if I want to integrate with a build / CI server, or code coverage or any other kind of TDD tool I may need? I did search these forums and mostly find people comparing the 3rd party frameworks to eachother and not even giving MSTest much of a chance... Is there a good reason why.. ?
Thanks for the advice
EDIT: Thanks to the replies in this thread, I've confirmed MSTest works for my purposes and integreated gracefully with CI tools and build servers.
But does anyone have any experience with FinalBuilder?? This is the tool that I'd like us to use for the build scripts to prevent having to write a ton of XML compared to other build tools. Any limitiations here that I should be aware of before committing to MS Test?
I should also note - we are using VSS =(. I'm hoping we can ax this soon - hopefully as part of, maybe even the first step, of setting up all of this infrastructure.
At Safewhere we currently use MSTest for TDD, and it works out okay.
Personally, I love the IDE integration, but dislike the API. If it ever becomes possible to integrate xUnit.NET with the VS test runner, we will migrate very soon thereafter.
At least with TFS, MSTest works pretty well as part of our CI.
All in all I find that MSTest works adequately for me, but I don't cling to it.
If you are evaluating mock libraries, take a look at this comparison.
I've been using MS Test since VS 2008 came out, but I haven't managed to strong-arm anything like TDD or CI here at work, although I've messed with Cruise Control a little in an attempt to build a CI server on my local box.
In general I've found MS Test to be pretty decent for testing locally, but there are some pain points for institutional use.
First, MS Test adds quite a few things that probably don't belong in source control. The .VSMDI files are particularly annoying; just running MS Test creates anywhere from 1 to 5 of them and adds them to the solution file. Which means churn on your .SLN in source control, and churn of that sort is bad.
I understand the supposed point behind these extra files -- tracking test run history and such -- but I don't find them particularly useful for anything but a single developer. You should use your build service and CI for that sort of thing!
Second, you either must have Team Foundation Server to run your unit tests as part of CI, or you have to have a copy of Visual Studio installed on your build server if you use, for example, Cruise Control.NET. See this Stack Overflow question for details.
In general, there's nothing wrong with MS Test. But going CI will not be as smooth as it could be.
I have been using MSTest very successfully in our company. We are currently setting up standardised build processes within our company and so far, we have had good success with TeamCity. For Continuous integration, we use out the box TeamCity configurations. For the actual release builds, we set up large msbuild scripts that automate the entire process.
I really like mstest because of the IDE integration and also that all our devs automatically can use it without installing any 3rd party dependencies. I would not recommend switching just because of the problem you are experiencing. I have come full circle, where we went over to nunit and then came back again. These frameworks are all the same at the end of the day so pick the one that is easiest for most your devs to get access to and start using.
What I suspect your problem might be... sounds like an obscure problem I have had before where incorrect references of dll's (eg: adding explicit references (via browse) to projects in your solution, and not using the project reference) leads to out-of-date problems that only come up after clean checkouts or builds.
The other really suspect issue that I have found before is if you have some visual component or control that has a public property of some custom type that is being serialised in the forms .resx file. I typically need to flag them with an attribute that says SerializationVisibility.Hidden. This means that the IDE will not try to generate setters for the property value (which is typically some object graph). Just a thought. Could be way out.
I trust the tools and they don't really lie about there being a genuine problem. They only misrepresent them or report them as something completely obscure. It sounds to me like you have this. I suspect this because the error message doesn't make sense if all is in order, but it does make sense if some piece of code has loaded up an out of date or modified version of the dll at that point.
I have successfully deployed several FinalBuilder installations and the customers have been very happy with the outcome. I can highly recommend it.

Continuous Integration: Unmanaged C++ on Visual Studio 2008

I've spent 4 years developing C++ using Visual Studio 2008 for a commercial company; it's now time for me to upgrade my development process.
Here's the problem: I dont have a 1 button build automation. I also dont have a CI server that automatically builds when a commit happens, and emails me whether a build is broken or not. Worse we dont even have a single unit test!!
Can someone please point to me how I can get started?
I have looked at many many tools and I think I might go with:
Visual Build (for build automation) (Note: I also considered Final Builder)
Cruise (for CI server)
I also now am just starting to practice TDD...so I will want to automate my unit tests as well. I chose Google Test/Mock for their extensive documentation. (Cant go wrong with Google brand can I? =p)
Price is not the issue, I want what's best and easiest to get started.
Can people that use real CI/automation tool for unmanaged MSVC++ tell me their tools and how I can go about starting?
Our source control is Subversion.
Last point: I'm also considering project management/tracking tool that integrates right into VSTD ..and thinking about using OnTime. VSTS costs too much. I tried FogBugz, but I think it's too simple. Any others?
I would take some time to seriously consider TeamCity. We used CruiseControl.NET for a while and TeamCity completely demolishes it. Plus it has built-in plugins for Boost and CppUnit, so your unit testing will come for free.
Best of all, the tool is free for < 20 users and gives you three build agents.
I just finished implementing our C++ product at work and it was fairly simple. We did it with msbuild and basically use the msbuild task to compile the solution. Other targets can be used to copy files, run unit tests, etc.
The last time I worked on an unmanaged MSVC++ project (which was moderately sized I might add), we used FinalBuilder to do the automated build & versioning (and even executing PCLint and other profiling tools as well).
Having said that, if you're willing to invest the time, MSBuild (or nAnt perhaps?) can do everything you need - even for unmanaged solutions.
Which brings us to the trade-off: Tools like Visual Build Pro and Final Builder get you up and running quickly. If you want something which offers a greater range of customization, you'll probably be spending a decent amount of time learning and understanding it - i.e. MSBuild, CIFactory, nAnt etc are no cake walk.
So if price isn't an issue - is time an issue? If time is at a premium, I'd investigate the GUI driven tools, they'll get you to where you want to go quickly. If you know you're going to need to extend on the simple one button build + unit tests + deploy scenario (which happens a lot!) then decide if you can invest the time into the more complex tools like MSBuild?
We use a combination of Boost.Build, NAnt, CPPUnit and either Cruise Control.NET or Hudson (we've used them both for various projects but are starting to prefer Hudson).
They are all good tools though we're considering replacing CPPUnit - the Google unit test system is pretty good from what I've seen.
If you're happy running on just Windows you can lose Boost.Build and just call out to Visual Studio from NAnt.
As for issue tracking/project management we settled on Vision Project after a long investigation. It's not well known (yet) but we've found it a very good fit in our environment. Fogbugz is great, a nice, clear interface but we came to the conclusion you did too; way too simple for our needs.
Although the .NET world is spoilt for these kinds of tools Continuous Integration is still pretty easy to set up for C++! I wouldn't think of starting a non-trivial project without putting these systems in place.
we use subversion + cruisecontrol + wix to accomplich CI automated builds outputting one-click installers. this combo has worked very well for us. we've created out own site for admin of svn user groups and permissioning and added the web interface to cc to it. we have a sql server storing all the collected stats from svn and cc and use them for custom reports available on our site. we are looking to add other tools to the mix for checking various attributes of the code stored in svn. this combo has worked very well for us.
At my company we use CruiseControl (http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/). The Java version, not .NET, to build our wxWidgets application on Windows and OS X. Working great for us so far.