Engine Discovery

A feature that numerous people are discussing is to have a host application be able to “discover” available engines to lazy load. This is a multi-step process:

1. We must define an engine bundle format.
2. We must support lazily-loaded engines that are fully-defined at build time with the client already aware of the engines.
3. We must define a way to advertise available engines.
4. We must create a way to inject the advertised engines into the host application.

Known issues that must be solved (known unknowns):

• Deep linking (currently solved at build time by propagating all routes to the top).
• How should this play with the {{mount}} keyword?
• How should this handle nested engines?
• Security.
• ???

Moving toward a solution to this problem should focus initially on getting us to lazy-loading, but we should keep this in the back of our minds so as not to paint ourselves into a corner.

/cc @mike183 @ebryn @miguelmadero @pestoney @marcemira @trentmwillis

[peStoney]

We are building an embedded operating system that is using a emberjs based UI. We would like to enable the user to add functionalities to the system later, that means at build time we don’t know which engines will be used so it’s needed to be defined at start time. I’m not entirely sure how to categorize this but I would say it’s also related to the deployment process.

[chadhietala]

These types of problems should be solved more generically in Ember CLI and not a divergent solution for Engines.