WoW:Ace (AddOn)
Ace is a lightweight and powerful system for building World of Warcraft addons. It is a new approach to addon development, a rethinking from the ground up. Ace provides developers with the tools needed by most addons, freeing them from repeating common tasks and allowing them to jump right into the creative part of building their addons. New and experienced addon coders alike can benefit from Ace's features.
Here is a brief list of its features:
- Initializes the addon after variables and character data load.
- Simple, flexible, and powerful data management.
- Customizable chat command handling.
- Improved function and method hooking.
- Enhanced event handling with the ability to create custom events.
- In-game addon disabling and enabling.
- Easy saving of settings per character and per class.
- Debug features with optional module.
- Built-in myAddons support.
The primary design philosophy of Ace is simple: less is more. This means less code, fewer resources used, less effort designing an addon, less stress on the UI. Every aspect of Ace is scrutinized for efficiency, not only in code design but in ensuring that only the necessary amount of memory and processing is used to perform a given task. This means that addons built with Ace are more efficient and can very likely free up memory and reduce game lag compared to an addon not using Ace.
In addition to this, Ace brings a much needed standard to addon development. Blizzard designed the World of Warcraft UI to offer a tremendous amount of flexibility to those with the desire to dig in and tinker with it. However, they didn't provide many tools and virtually no documentation. So addon developers have had to rely on their own ingenuity to dig into the existing code and figure it out. Through trial and error, much has been learned about how the UI works.
Ace seeks to consolidate this knowledge into a central resource, providing developers with a full addon framework that is easy to use, very flexible, and very powerful. This framework provides the most common components addons need, like data management and chat command handling, and it also provides a glue that links addons together and allows them to share system resources smoothly and efficiently.
To get started using Ace, visit http://www.wowace.com to download, or stop by the forums to discuss development and use of Ace AddOns.