EmberJS Confuses Me

Curious for yourself? Try following my simple starter app tutorial of Rails + Ember.js here: http://www.devmynd.com/blog/2013-3-rails-ember-js

Though, I understand the pain of coming from a server-side MVC architecture, I found it refreshing that Ember.js takes the "desktop" MVC approach. Our web apps are now living on the client, acting like desktop apps. Most people struggle with this reverse at first, but can conceptually catch on if shown the way. I think what really needs to happen is a good screencast or two walking through these concepts. I'm interested in putting something together and will when I have the time.

I come from Backbonejs background with which I have worked for about 1.5 years. So I feel quite comfortable with it.

I decided to try Emberjs - not for any other reason than trying to pick up something else and see how other JS framework approaches.

I gave full two-days worth of time into it. Initially I thought - "How different can it get?" Plus, I believe even if it's very foreign I'll just keep reading, googling, stackoverflowin', youtube-tutorialin' to get my head around.

I gave up though. Here's my hopefully constructive rant, though my views are probably not as deep as the OP's.

* Many of the posts on the net are outdated. I followed a few tutorials here and there, and then things didn't work, so I asked on Stackoverflow, then the answer I got was "Dude, your code is outdated". Sure this is probably similar thing for other frameworks - but I'm just sayin'

* Models - So there is Ember Object, which you can use as models, but you can also use Ember-data.js which is more "glorified" data. Documentation wasn't clear on the difference. Plus, Ember-data.js was quite hard to get started with. It didn't work well with other versions of Emberjs. I really had to dig in to find the right one to start off with. I ended up cloning a github repo of a tutorial that worked, because nothing else did.

* Documentation on "convention over configuration" - OK, so convention over conf. is fine. But the official documentation and many of the tutorials didn't explain what all the conventions there were. I went through a tutorial app, which only had Controller, but things just "worked", because the Emberjs builds all other things for you. Well I didn't know that! THE BEST INTRO EMBERJS VIDEO I found was this.

http://toranbillups.com/blog/

It finally made sense in the end for me.

* But in the end, among all other things I wanted to do, I gave up, because the frustration was mounting up. I guess I can still persist through it. But I just finished AngularJS tutorial demo and in 2 hours, it makes sense to me.

This is the comment I agree with most. Replace a solution defined as a "design pattern" with one defined as a data structure and you get a lot more clarity. The problem MVC solves can be recomposed as "synchronization of concurrent, related, mutable data structures." The relations are definable as a DAG for each direction; the synchronization process with a cyclical graph.

source for this please?

+1. you hit the nail on the head and articulated what I was feeling when I played with ember.