WoW:Ace (AddOn)

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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.


Brief feature list and component overview

AceLibrary
AceLibrary handles version compatibility of libraries - Ace ones as well as your own. It also helps with error handling.
AceOO
AceOO provides an object-orientation framework.
AceAddon
AceAddon is Ace's main interface to AddOns. Ace components present their functionality through it. It also handles simple initialization events.
AceConsole
AceConsole provides console I/O functionality - slash commands, easy printing, etc.
AceDB
AceDB allows for fast, clean, and featureful saved variable access, including per-class settings and more.
  
AceEvent
AceEvent allows for simple event handling, scheduling, and inter-addon communication.
AceDebug
AceDebug simplifies AddOn debugging.
AceHook
AceHook provides safe hooking of functions, methods, and scripts.
AceLocale
AceLocale makes localization (translation) of your AddOns ridiculously simple.
AceModuleCore
AceModuleCore helps you split your AddOn into separate "modules" that can easily be turned on and off. Handles enabling/disabling of events, hooks, tooltip scanners, etc for you.

Template:Spc Ace also has built-in myAddons support.

Template:Spc At the writing of this article, Ace2 is in the works, which is a major step up in documentation, and also allows the library (whichever parts you need) to be fully embedded into your AddOn if you do not want to depend on Ace being installed separately.

== Ace's design philosophy ==

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.

== Ace Resources ==


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