Some final words concerning Ace2
Just because it's a question I get pretty frequently: No, I won't change MobMap to use the Ace2 library, because MobMap would not benefit at all from that.
Most of the following is copied from one of my older comments on the ui.worldofwar.net page of MobMap, it summarizes pretty well why that is the case. Don't read it if you're afraid of excessive use of brackets to create very long sentences ;-)
While Ace2 is a well-designed library that makes programming addons easier for the programmers (because it saves you from having to do repetitive tasks like setting up chat commands or similar stuff manually), it also takes a lot of power and control from the hands of the programmer, which is something I personally don't like at all. I like to stay in control, to know what my addon really does, because its actions are much more predictable for me if I use as less libraries written by other people as possible, and that in turn results in better maintainability for me and in the end less unfixed bugs for you, the users.
Besides that, this approach is what made MobMap possible in the first place, because the hand-optimized data structures I use to store the MobMap database are essentially the trick that makes it possible to stuff a database that takes up way over 40 Megabytes in the form of MySQL tables into less than 4 megabytes of lua memory while still keeping it accessible.
Something I also don't like specifically about the Ace2 library is the almost religious belief some people have in this library and its performance-enhancing capabilities (okay, that's not really the libraries' fault, the library itself as a technical tool is actually pretty nice, but this kind of religion that has evolved around this technical tool for addon developers still bugs me because it leads people to wrong assumptions).
The widespread assumption that you can make an addon perform better simply by using the Ace2 library is, for example, just plain nonsense. Ace2 is not some performance snake-oil you rub on an addon and it magically performs better. You can write slow code without Ace2 and you can certainly write slow code that uses the Ace2 library - there's no difference, because even when using Ace2 you'll have to write the "business logic" that powers your addon yourself.
The same is true for the memory requirements. Every addon needs memory for three things: the code, the UI frames and its data. The code part of memory usage (here Ace2 really does things differently because it only gets loaded once and is then shared among addons) is in many cases too small to really make a big difference, the most memory is often consumed by the data structures an addon uses to store the data it works with, and those can be designed efficiently or inefficiently by the programmer, no matter if he uses Ace2 or not (actually I even think using pre-made libraries doesn't really encourage a programmer to create customized data structures that are as efficient as possible for the special task at hand, but instead to use the general-purpose stuff supported by the library). Good performance is nothing you get by using any library, you get it by programming with performance in mind, starting at the first line of code you write (and that actually is the main reason why many of the Ace2-based addons are in fact performing better than their non-ace counterparts: their programmers wrote them with good performance as one goal. Besides that, many Ace2 addons more or less copy a functionality that has been available before from a non-ace addon; this means that the problematic parts of a solution are already known from the older addon which makes it generally much easier to find an improved implementation).
I did not make the same mistake I did with ATSW before and wrote MobMap with performance and memory-efficiency in mind, and I think the result is pretty close to the optimum reachable under the constraints of the WoW/lua environment which was never even remotely meant to house databases like the MobMap database. Plugging in that Ace2 library for whatever reason would certainly not "magically" improve this situation any further, it would just introduce another component that could possibly cause problems.
Most of the following is copied from one of my older comments on the ui.worldofwar.net page of MobMap, it summarizes pretty well why that is the case. Don't read it if you're afraid of excessive use of brackets to create very long sentences ;-)
While Ace2 is a well-designed library that makes programming addons easier for the programmers (because it saves you from having to do repetitive tasks like setting up chat commands or similar stuff manually), it also takes a lot of power and control from the hands of the programmer, which is something I personally don't like at all. I like to stay in control, to know what my addon really does, because its actions are much more predictable for me if I use as less libraries written by other people as possible, and that in turn results in better maintainability for me and in the end less unfixed bugs for you, the users.
Besides that, this approach is what made MobMap possible in the first place, because the hand-optimized data structures I use to store the MobMap database are essentially the trick that makes it possible to stuff a database that takes up way over 40 Megabytes in the form of MySQL tables into less than 4 megabytes of lua memory while still keeping it accessible.
Something I also don't like specifically about the Ace2 library is the almost religious belief some people have in this library and its performance-enhancing capabilities (okay, that's not really the libraries' fault, the library itself as a technical tool is actually pretty nice, but this kind of religion that has evolved around this technical tool for addon developers still bugs me because it leads people to wrong assumptions).
The widespread assumption that you can make an addon perform better simply by using the Ace2 library is, for example, just plain nonsense. Ace2 is not some performance snake-oil you rub on an addon and it magically performs better. You can write slow code without Ace2 and you can certainly write slow code that uses the Ace2 library - there's no difference, because even when using Ace2 you'll have to write the "business logic" that powers your addon yourself.
The same is true for the memory requirements. Every addon needs memory for three things: the code, the UI frames and its data. The code part of memory usage (here Ace2 really does things differently because it only gets loaded once and is then shared among addons) is in many cases too small to really make a big difference, the most memory is often consumed by the data structures an addon uses to store the data it works with, and those can be designed efficiently or inefficiently by the programmer, no matter if he uses Ace2 or not (actually I even think using pre-made libraries doesn't really encourage a programmer to create customized data structures that are as efficient as possible for the special task at hand, but instead to use the general-purpose stuff supported by the library). Good performance is nothing you get by using any library, you get it by programming with performance in mind, starting at the first line of code you write (and that actually is the main reason why many of the Ace2-based addons are in fact performing better than their non-ace counterparts: their programmers wrote them with good performance as one goal. Besides that, many Ace2 addons more or less copy a functionality that has been available before from a non-ace addon; this means that the problematic parts of a solution are already known from the older addon which makes it generally much easier to find an improved implementation).
I did not make the same mistake I did with ATSW before and wrote MobMap with performance and memory-efficiency in mind, and I think the result is pretty close to the optimum reachable under the constraints of the WoW/lua environment which was never even remotely meant to house databases like the MobMap database. Plugging in that Ace2 library for whatever reason would certainly not "magically" improve this situation any further, it would just introduce another component that could possibly cause problems.
