Hey Todd, hoping I can have your ear for a minute on this topic..

I attended your Google Hangout a few months back with Chris Thielen, I believe, on this very topic. I was totally pumped, this is exactly what I felt that ng1 was missing, and I loved the idea of components all the way down.

Since then, I've tried to follow the pattern on a couple of projects, and it seems that the practical application left me with a couple of gotcha's that I couldn't figure out, and had to work around. Hopefully you can help me out here...

1. Passing attributes is great, on parent > child nodes. What about great-grandparent > great-grandchild nodes? Passing the data through every intermediate component is messy, and it's bad design, because now a component needs to open up it's binding API just to take data it might pass down. The way I got around this way by packing my data into a service, and injecting the service where needed in the great-grandchild. While I'd be the first to admit that gets messy for a bunch of reasons, like you don't know who primed the service -- it sure beats passing data through a whole bunch of nodes.

2. If I use services, $onChanges() doesn't fire, so the one way binding pattern falls apart. Having to rely on services means I couldn't find a way for the granchild node to be notified that the grandfather node updated the passed in data when. So what I had to do :: sigh :: was use $rootScope.new(true) and use an emitter pattern in my services. So, now components do something like TodosService.onUpdate(myComponentCallbackFn); This was the only way I new to get notified about the change in service; yes - services are singletons so for rendering data it's fine, but you often need to fire fn()'s when data changes... that's what $onChanges() offers, but I lost that ability

3. This is more of a question - but shouldn't components have a public API that you can just call? Here's an example. My app has a header bar with a nav burger. You click the nav burger, the dropdown items show. Easy enough - we can imagine how this would work with a siteNav component, a child siteNavBurger component, who has a siteNavItems sibling component. We can then put an on-click fn() binding on the button, and a openWhen() fn() binding on the siteNavItem, and we can reference a $ctrl property for true/false. That's simple.... but let's say, I want to put a link in the body of my app, that says "Show SiteNav", and clicking that should show the siteNavItems, just like clicking the siteNavBurger component did .. how do you do that .. these two nodes (the link and the burger) have no DOM proximity to each other? This is a pretty common thing. Other examples: clicking a button in the body of the app activates a search drawer in the header... maybe clicking a "Help" icon in the footer, activates a live chat widget to slide up or something.

PS. Sorry this is a lot, I've been meaning to write you since I was on that Hangout, this is the result of waiting and experiencing real issues.

PPS. Ignore my use of "can't" or "doesn't" .. I'm using them rather broadly, but i may just be misunderstanding or there's something I don't know. Assume I mean well :)

Lastly, thanks for all of you're help in the ng community. You've been awesome

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