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Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

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Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#61

Post by logical42 »

typicalrunt wrote: post #42
MattRogish wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Ember + Rails at work and if we didn't start with an Ember expert contractor we'd have been sunk. Ember is definitely a winding maze of stuff and until there's a "Agile Web Development with Ember 1.0" book, it's still very difficult to just jump in from scratch. Still, once we've learned Ember we're very happy with it. Backbone is just too small to start any medium/large app, and Ember has a decent community b…

What function is the Rails component serving? Is it just a REST interface or is it also acting as a separate HTML interface?

You can do both, for example, you can use rails for authentication with traditional views and then use ember for the main single page app. I think this is how square does it.

Also you should look into active model serializers for integrating rails with ember. I think it's yehuda Katz' preferred method for Jason serialization from rails to ember.

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#62

Post by robomartin »

davidw wrote: post #36

I have a rant coming about these things too. * I started out with Backbone. It seems ok as far as it goes, but a bit annoying in that there's enough "magic" and stuff going on that I don't quite understand it completely, but without enough magic to really make things simple and easy. * Angular.js. Now this is more like it in terms of magic. Then, the other day, I decided to add a date picker to one of my forms. Uh oh…

> jquery-pjax

What happens to SEO?

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#63

Post by jaequery »

davidw wrote: post #36

I have a rant coming about these things too. * I started out with Backbone. It seems ok as far as it goes, but a bit annoying in that there's enough "magic" and stuff going on that I don't quite understand it completely, but without enough magic to really make things simple and easy. * Angular.js. Now this is more like it in terms of magic. Then, the other day, I decided to add a date picker to one of my forms. Uh oh…

i've went the backbone/knockout/angular route and i think all of them works great for simple things. but if your project gets a bit more complex (or where your code-base changes frequently), you'll start running into all kinds of problems. yes, you can usually hack around them after several exchanges on the mailinglists/irc, but very time-consuming nevertheless.

now, i'm back to plain javascript/jquery. i run into less headaches and more control, therefore more productive. my gripe is the same as op, the "magic" is what throws me off. angular is a bit too buggy, last i used was 6 months ago, and still lot of things they didn't support like proper callbacks upon rendering, etc ...

basically something really easy to do in plain js, becomes like a rubik's cube with all the magic going on. just be prepared to write a lot of extra code/hacks/patches for certain things to just "work" if you decide to go the i.e; angular route. but don't say i didn't warn you :)

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#64

Post by tbatterii »

securingsincity wrote: post #53
heyitsnick wrote: post #23

I wanted to use Ember, and I started going down that road, but I just didn't click with it. I didn't progress past the tutorial! I can't remember what exactly I didn't get working, but I just felt very lost and overwhelmed, and that was spending a couple of days reading around online, looking at the code and examples.* I switched to Backbone and got going right away, in half a day of reading the docs and watching a c…

I actually just had this same experience this past weekend. Hours spent banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why Ember-Data wasn't working. I don't know what wasn't clicking but I decided to switch to backbone for this project. Literally minutes of work to get backbone going and have my data appear properly.

we use ember at the day job, and historically i've been primarily the backend guy slowly getting familiar with what the front end guys are doing. I agree that the ember-data stuff is pretty thin on docs at the moment. IIRC, it wasn't part of the original stack, but obviously everyone wants a mvc with that persistence layer. So a -1 for that, not sure if it will be a part of ember by the time it reaches 1.0 or not. (oh yeah, it's still technically beta)

But ember shines in other areas that people wont care about until they have to write single page web apps with a high enough complexity that warrants it. The reason we ditched gwt for ember was the 2 way bindings. Not having to write all that stuff(and test it(in every browser))has been a productivity boost, even though we had to plugin our own persistence layer.

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#65

Post by samratjp »

outside1234 wrote: post #52
heyitsnick wrote: post #23

I wanted to use Ember, and I started going down that road, but I just didn't click with it. I didn't progress past the tutorial! I can't remember what exactly I didn't get working, but I just felt very lost and overwhelmed, and that was spending a couple of days reading around online, looking at the code and examples.* I switched to Backbone and got going right away, in half a day of reading the docs and watching a c…

A lot of work has been done to make it easier to get started with Ember. You should check out the guides on emberjs.com.

+1 - I've been following the Ember progress and have been blown away with the progress made last year. It's the most mature UI friendly framework for frontend out there. Fwiw, this (slightly outdated router code but a good philosophical intro) post is super useful for diving into Ember - http://trek.github.com/

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#66

Post by sawyer »

lefnire wrote: post #4
aioprisan wrote: post #3

actually, Meteor is not like Derby. For one, you don't need to deal with callbacks when data is changed. Meteor can automatically figure out what data sources are bound to certain containers in the template being rendered and when you make a change in the database, the data is pushed to all the clients. Here are some good details on the differences: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842525 . Also, Meteor now has a…

!! Those REST packes enable server-side routes? I remember the last time I checked, when Meteor had it's new "server pages" it was Phantom generated snapshots of client renders, which blew my mind. I'll explore those packages, that was my biggest gripe and may motivate me to take down my post.

The meteor-router package does enable server side routing, yes. Take a look at the bottom of the README on github.

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#67

Post by davidw »

robomartin wrote: post #62
davidw wrote: post #36

I have a rant coming about these things too. * I started out with Backbone. It seems ok as far as it goes, but a bit annoying in that there's enough "magic" and stuff going on that I don't quite understand it completely, but without enough magic to really make things simple and easy. * Angular.js. Now this is more like it in terms of magic. Then, the other day, I decided to add a date picker to one of my forms. Uh oh…

> jquery-pjax What happens to SEO?

This particular project runs in kiosk mode, more or less, so I don't care about it at all. Also, if it's just pages, rather than an application, you probably don't need this whole extra layer of junk.

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#68

Post by debergalis »

eranation wrote: post #60
debergalis wrote: post #24

[meteor dev] Please come help us with this! We have six engineers at Meteor and dozens more contributors in the community working on the platform every day. The plan to 1.0, including REST, is at http://roadmap.meteor.com/ . Here's the guiding principle behind Meteor. There should be a dramatically faster, more accessible way to write applications. Improving that developer experience means rethinking some things: aut…

Meteor is one of the most exciting things I've seen recently. Will gladly help, what things you need most and how one get started? and do you accept people that like TypeScript, Java, Scala and come from the enterprise world? :)

Yeah, absolutely. See http://roadmap.meteor.com/ for the high-level view and http://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues for some starting points on building out code. Another good option is building Atmosphere packages at http://atmosphere.meteor.com/.

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#69

Post by catch23 »

heyitsnick wrote: post #23

I wanted to use Ember, and I started going down that road, but I just didn't click with it. I didn't progress past the tutorial! I can't remember what exactly I didn't get working, but I just felt very lost and overwhelmed, and that was spending a couple of days reading around online, looking at the code and examples.* I switched to Backbone and got going right away, in half a day of reading the docs and watching a c…

Ember data docs are pretty sparse, but once you get up and going, the learning curve is pretty flat. Backbone is pretty easy to get going, but the code complexity gets exponential when you have lots of collections and references that need to be updated.

It's easy to get frustrated with ember & ember-data and just jump ship to backbone, but you'll be paying for it later when your data model expands beyond 5 interconnected models.

The best advice is to tough it out with ember even if the docs are weak and tutorials are sparse.

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#70

Post by samratjp »

securingsincity wrote: post #53
heyitsnick wrote: post #23

I wanted to use Ember, and I started going down that road, but I just didn't click with it. I didn't progress past the tutorial! I can't remember what exactly I didn't get working, but I just felt very lost and overwhelmed, and that was spending a couple of days reading around online, looking at the code and examples.* I switched to Backbone and got going right away, in half a day of reading the docs and watching a c…

I actually just had this same experience this past weekend. Hours spent banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why Ember-Data wasn't working. I don't know what wasn't clicking but I decided to switch to backbone for this project. Literally minutes of work to get backbone going and have my data appear properly.

Ember Data is a heavy hard-hat area and no wonder you were frustrated. Really, just start with your own data layer and get used to Ember first. Ember has a very Rails-ish philosophy and just like in the Rails world - magic happens (but ya should know how it happens anyways). This blog post is a good intro to how Ember works - http://trek.github.com/ (though routing has come a long way since - http://emberjs.com/guides/routing/defining-your-routes/
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