If you couldn’t wait for the video to be uploaded, here is a write-up of the talk I gave at EmberConf 2015 earlier this week, sans the jokes. You can find the slides here. For those at the conference, the last section has a little bit of new content that I couldn’t fit into original presentation.

This post will be updated with a link to the video when it is available.

Video is live!

Real-world Adapters

Suppose you just bought a new vacuum cleaner. As with most modern appliances, the vacuum cleaner comes with one of those grounded/three-pinned plugs. Unfortunately, the wiring in your home is a bit dated, and all of the power outlets are two-pinned. What do you do?

Obviously, you can shell out the money to re-wire your entire house and upgrade the outlets. While that’s probably something you should eventually do, it seemed like a disproportionate amount of effort just to be able to use a new vacuum cleaner.

Of course, there is a simpler way – you can just use an adapter. The adapter would expose a two-pinned plug on one side and a three-pinned socket on the other, seamlessly bridging the incompatible interfaces and allow you to use the new vacuum cleaner anywhere in your house.

In this case, the adapter is trivial – you could in-theory just tape two cooper wires to the plug, insert that into the outlet and it would probably still work.

This is not always the case though, sometimes your adapter has to do more work than that. When Apple rolled out the lightning port on their iDevices, plenty of their customers have invested in stereo systems that comes with the old 30-pin dock connector, so they made an adapter for that.

This adapter is more complicated, though. The two ports have vastly different specifications – they speak completely different protocols, and one of them is even reversible – so a simple re-mapping of the pins just won’t cut it. However, despite those differences, they are functionally equivilant for the task at hand – they are both fully capable of streaming audio from your iDevices to the stereo systems.

So, what Apple did was that they basically put a mini-computer inside the plug and have it decode protocol messages and dynamically translate them for the other side. It is an elaborate hack, but it works.

The Adapter Pattern

The adapter pattern is the software version of these real world adapters.

Suppose your have acquired a sensor that allows you to measure the current temperature. Unfortunately, the driver is hardcoded to report temperatures in Celsius codebase you are working with expects Fahrenheit everywhere. What do you do?

var CelsiusSensor = { getTemperature : function () { // Measures temperature in °C } }; function FahrenheitMonitor ( sensor ) { setInterval ( function () { // Expects °F if ( sensor . readTemperature () > 100 ) { ... } }, 1000 ); };

Now, you can go ahead and rewrite all those parts of your codebase. Whether that is a feasible or not depends on the complexity of your existing code, but it is probably the digital-equivilant of rewiring your house to use a vacuum cleaner.

Alternatively, you can just write an adapter! Just like the real-world adapters, your adapter code would expose an interface that the consuming end expects, and internally use another object to fulfill these requests:

function CelsiusSensorAdapter ( sensor ) { this . sensor = sensor ; }; CelsiusSensorAdapter . prototype = { readTemperature : function () { return this . sensor . getTemperature () * 1.8 + 32 ; } }; // Use it! new FahrenheitMonitor ( new CelsiusSensorAdapter ( CelsiusSensor ) );

Real-world Adapter Patterns

To show you how this pattern could be applied in the real-world – Ember apps in particular – I made a Hacker News extension for Chrome. It is available from the chrome web store, or you can just try it online here. You can also find the source code on GitHub.

Once you have it installed, every time you visit Hacker News from Chrome, the extension will take over and present you with a better reading interface built with Ember.js.

Getting The Data

The first challenge for building a HN reader like this is that you would have to get the data from somewhere. Normally, you would just make calls to an API that returns the data in JSON format – and this is what Ember Data expects too.

But there are a few problems.

First of all, at the time I started the project, Hacker News does not have an official API, so I have no server to talk to. (They latter added a Firebase-powered API, but at the time of writing, it still doesn’t offer all the features you would find on the website, so I wouldn’t be able to do everything I wanted to do with the extension.)

I could use one of the unofficial APIs that others have created. There are a lot of those, actually, but it is very hard to tell which ones are still maintained or how reliable they are. They also don’t offer all the features you will find on the web interface, either.

Of course, I can also write my own API, but I am way too lazy for that. All I want is to have some fun writing the front-end app, and I don’t want to have to write and maintain a server side component.

But there is another way – if you look at the Hacker News website, all the data I want is already on the page. So, if you can fetch the HTML pages from the Hacker News server, I can just parse out the data and use them however I want.

In fact, this is just how all the unofficial APIs work. They just have the server scrape the HTML page, parse out the data on the server-side and send them back in JSON format.

Since my extension runs in the Hacker News domain, I don’t really need to go through a server for that – I can just make regular AJAX calls to fetch the HTML pages, then parse them directly from within the browser.

(You don’t actually have to be on the same domain to do this – you can just go through a CORS proxy. However, it won’t send along the cookies, so you won’t be able to do anything that requires the user to be authenticated.)

That’s exactly what I did.

$ . get ( "/news" ). then ( function ( html ) { var stories = []; $ ( html ). find ( "tr .title a" ). each ( function ( _ , $link ) { stories . push ({ title : $link . text (), url : $link . attr ( 'href' ) }); }); ... return stories ; });

As you can see, I first make an AJAX request to retrieve the HTML page, then run it through an HTML parser and extract the elements I need to build the JSON representation of the data I am interested in.

(I should warn you that this is pseudo/simplified code. The code snippets in the slides and this blog post are meant to show you the key ideas, but they are not complete and/or safe, so you should always refer to the actual code on GitHub if you are interested in implementing them.)

Now that we have the JSON data, it would be nice if there is a good way to store them locally and use them in the app.

Of course, in the Ember world, the answer for that is to use Ember Data. But since Ember Data is meant for fetching JSON data from APIs, it can’t possibly work with crazy hacks like this, right?

Well, that might have been true a year or two ago. Today’s Ember data is very much just a local object store for your model data, and it makes very few assumption about where your data are coming from and how you are fetching them.

Out of the box, it does expect your data source to be a JSON API that behave according to some specification. If your API happens to tick all the boxes, you can just plug it in and everything would Just Work™.

However, if your API doesn’t work exactly like Ember Data expect, or in my case, if your data source isn’t even an API at all, it doesn’t mean you are out of luck.

From Ember Data’s perspective, all it needs is a data source – something that can provide it with the right data at the right time. All you have to do is to drop an adapter between them to help them talk to each other. This in such a common pattern that Ember data already has built-in support for it via the DS.Adapter and DS.Serializer classes:

App . StoryAdapter = DS . Adapter . extend ({ findAll ( store , type , id ) { return $ . get ( "/news" ); } }); App . StorySerializer = DS . Serializer . extend ({ extractArray ( store , type , payload ) { var stories = []; $ ( payload ). find ( "tr .title a" ). each ( ... ); return stories ; } });

Without getting into too much details, the adapter is responsible for fetching the data from the server, and the serializer is responsible for interpreting the data and massage them into the right shape for Ember data.

(Igor Terzic did a workshop on Ember Data adapters at Ember Conf, so if you are interested in learning more, you might want to reach out to see if he has plans to do that again sometime.)

Fixing the URLs

If you are familiar with Ember, you probably know that it has strong opinions and conventions around how you should structure your URLs.

For a page like this, you would probably have a URL structure that resembles this:

/ | The application route (the "gutter" on the left) | /stories | The sidebar that shows the list of stories | /stories/:story_id | The header on the main content panel on the right | /stories/:story_id/{article,comments} | The content of the article/comments tab

The router API does offer you some flexibility to control how you want to name each of these segments, but in general, you need to have one segment per nested outlet, and you can’t deviate too far from that before you feel that you are just managing everything yourself and fighting the framework a lot.

This is a perfectly reasonable design, and it works great for 99% of the things you would want to build. However, in this case, my extension needs to maintain 100% compatibility with Hacker News’ existing URL structure, or else it would break when my users try to visit a Hacker News link from elsewhere, or when they try to share a link with other people.

To give you an idea, here are some of the URLs I have to work with. On the left is the “ideal” URL structure for the Ember router, based on the nesting in the UI; on the right are the actual URLs for the equivalent pages on the Hacker News website:

“IDEAL” URL | ACTUAL URL ---------------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------- | /stories | /news | /stories?filter=latest | /newest | /stories/9132815/comments | /item?id=9132815 | /stories/9132815/comments?highlight=9133317 | /item?id=9133317

You probably saw this coming – I can just write an adapter for this!

On one hand we have the Hacker News URLs, and on the other hand we have the Ember router, and we an adapter in between – this much should be obvious.

What is not obvious though, is where we would put that adapter and what it would look like. It would help if we take a step back consider what’s the actual role of these URLs in an Ember app.

If you think about it, URLs is really just a way for Ember app to serialize the current state of the application. When you first open the app, Ember will deserialize the initial state from the URL and show the right things on the screen. As you use the app, Ember will keep updating the URLs, so that the application states are persisted across refresh, back buttons and so on.

With that in mind, the thing we need to adapt should become more clear. What I actually want to do here is to influence how Ember reads and writes these states, and from there I can trick Ember into seeing different URLs than what is actually shown to the user.

As it turns out, I am once again, not alone in solving this problem. Ember already support two ways to read and write the URLs out-of-the-box: the “normal” URLs using the history API, and the hash URLs to support older browsers:

HISTORY LOCATION | HASH LOCATION ---------------------------------------------+---------------------------------------------- | /stories | #/stories | /stories?filter=latest | #/stories?filter=latest | /stories/9132815/comments | #/stories/9132815/comments | /stories/9132815/comments?highlight=9133317 | #/stories/9132815/comments?highlight=9133317

To support these two types of URLs, Ember is once again using the adapter pattern. These two mechanisms are encapsulated inside the HistoryLocation and HashLocation classes, which expose a uniform interface to the rest of the stack regardless of which concrete implementation is being used.

This is great news, because I can just as easily write my own adapter, too!

App . HackerNewsLocation = Ember . HistoryLocation . extend ({ getURL : function () { var actualURL = this . _super (); switch ( actualURL ) { case "/news" : return "/stories" ; case "/newest" : return "/stories?filter=latest" ; ... } }, formatURL : function ( logicalPath ) { switch ( logicalPath ) { case "/stories" : return "/news" ; case "/stories?filter=latest" : return "/newest" ; ... } } }); App . register ( "location:hacker-news" , App . HackerNewsLocation ); App . Router . reopen ({ location : "hacker-news" });

Because Ember already has to support the two different URL types across the entire stack, once I implemented this adapter correctly, everything Just Works™ – for example, when you generate a link using the `` handlebars helper, Ember would first call formatURL to before putting it into the href attribute of the <a> tags, so that when a user command-click on a link to open it in a new tab, they will end up at the right place.

To be honest, I am a little surprised by how well this worked out, given that I am probably the only one who uses the location adapters this way.

This is a great testament to the power of the adapter pattern. By slicing things at the right boundary of abstraction, your code can work seamlessly with use cases that you haven’t even dreamed of when you wrote the original code.

Storing User Preferences

The last challenge that I want to talk about briefly is storing the user’s preferences.

There is a little trick I would like to show you: open this page on two different tabs/windows, and then a long discussion thread on another. Try changing the “Folding Threshold” slider – you will notice that the value updates instantly in the other preferences tab/window, and the comments thread would re-render accordingly to reflect that setting.

While this is probably not a very useful feature, it is in fact solving a real problem.

What I really want to accomplish is to store the preferences in a way that is persisted across browser sessions. Naturally, I turned to the Local Storage API for this. The problem, is that I also want to observe/bind to these values in my Ember app, so that I can use them in my handlebars templates, computed properties, and so on.

In Ember apps, the data binding functionality is provided by Ember.Object , or more accurately the Ember.Observable mixin that is included in Ember.Object .

If we put the two APIs side-by-side, you might notice some similarities:

LOCAL STORAGE | Ember.Observable -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- | localStorage.getItem("key"); | obj.get("key"); | localStorage.setItem("key", value); | obj.set("key", value); | $(window).on("storage", ...); | obj.addObserver( ... );

This seems like a textbook example for the adapter pattern:

App . LocalStorage = Ember . Object . extend ({ init : function () { $ ( window ). on ( "storage" , Ember . run . bind ( this , "_onStorageEvent" ) ); }, unknownProperty : function ( key ) { return localStorage . getItem ( key ); }, setUnknownProperty : function ( key , value ) { localStorage . setItem ( key , value ); return true ; }, _onStorageEvent : function ( e ) { this . notifyPropertyChange ( e . key ); }, willDestroy : function () { $ ( window ). off ( "storage" ); } });

Indeed, all I have to do is to write an adapter that exposes the same interface as an Ember.Object ( Ember.Observable ), with that, the rest of the Ember is able to bind and observe its values as usual.

(See this blog post for in in-depth explanation. My full implementation also added a caching layer to improve performance.)

The Possibilities

With these examples, I hope I have showed you the power of the adapter pattern. I think this is an important pattern to consciously learn when you are using a full-stack framework like Ember and Rails.

A lot of people will tell you that a set of small, composable libraries is better than an opinionated framework, because when your constraints doesn’t line up perfectly with the framework’s choices, you are basically out of luck.

I think this is not necessarily true. When using your own set of libraries, you basically have to implement all the adapters to glue together all the individual components yourself. On the other hand, a well-designed framework like Ember and Rails is basically just a curated set of libraries that work together seamlessly out-of-the-box. If something doesn’t work for you out-of-the-box, you can just replace those parts and drop in a custom adapter or two.

I hope that you can also see past the examples and use cases I’ve shown here.

Perhaps you have an existing content site and you are considering doing a redesign in Ember.js. Maybe you can consider writing a quick scraper adapter for your prototype, instead of bothering the backend team to implement a full-blown JSON API on day one?

Suppose you are building a presentation software that has a presenter display component and the full-screen slides in two separate windows. If you recognize that the URLs are just a way to track the current application state, perhaps you could implement a LocationAdapter backed by localStorage to keep everything in sync?

Once you are down the path of enlightenment, the possibilities are endless.

(Thank you EmberConf organizers, volunteers, speakers and attendees for the amazing conference! <3 <3 <3 <3 <3)

Hire Us!

Interested in Ember.js training for your team? Need help building your next ambitious web application? Get in touch!

P.S. If you are in Vancouver, join us at our regular Ember meetups!