History of the project

This project has its roots in late 2016, when Andreas Schacht, my then co-worker, and me started to work on ember-responsive-image. This came out of the need to render optimized responsive images in our framkework of choice Ember.js, for client projects at kaliber5, the consultancy that I co-founded.

As strong believers in open source software, and as this proved to be useful for others as well, we started the project in the open on GitHub, see the first commit. Don't look too closely at the code though, 2016 was different! 😅

Over time it matured and improved. Feature-wise by adding support for e.g. next-gen image formats, Image CDNs or SSR (aka FastBoot in Ember world). Also much of the underlying implementation evolved, moving from invoking ImageMagick to using sharp, adopting Ember's Octane patterns (native classes, Glimmer components) and TypeScript.

But at some point it become obvious that we were running into a more fundamental technical problem, when Embroider, Ember's next-gen build system, which is building a bridge towards adopting popular ecosystem build tools like webpack or Vite, was going to take over the very Ember-specific build system of Ember CLI. Alongside that came a new v2 format to publish Ember addons. Previously, ember-responsive-image had the privilege of using the superpowers that v1 addons gave us, by being able to provide Ember runtime code (the component to render responsive images) and plugging into the (legacy) Ember CLI build (for processing local images) at the same time. With the new v2 format, which are basically just static npm packages now that you import runtime code from, this was not possible anymore. So what's next?

As Embroider embraced off-the-shelve build tools like webpack and later Vite, this project basically had to do the same. Instead of tying our image processing into the legacy build system, we started to offer native build-plugins for what Embroider uses already: webpack and Vite. These are now doing the heavy lifting, albeit in a completely frontend framework agnostic way!

This opened up the way to rethink the scope of this project: instead of being coupled to one specific framework, Ember (which I still love btw and encourage you to check out if you haven't lately!), this project started to move into a multi-framework project. Gone is the ember-responsive-image package, say hello to @responsive-image/ember, which is now a fully static lightweight v2 addon. Support for other frameworks is planned. Have ideas, or want to contribute? Feel free to raise an issue, PR's are certainly very welcome as well! 😀

So stay tuned, the future is hopefully bright!

PS. none of this would have been possible without the help of other people and building on the shoulders of giants, which I want to give credit here!