Why we're moving away from Ember.js

I've hacked my webserver to respond to any request that looks like a Backbone route. For example, if you define a backbone route '/search/:query/:page', the server will return a minimal html page to any request starting with '/search'. The minimal html contains the backbone and app javascript, which then dynamically renders the page.

I've been using Ember for nearly two months to build a product. Every day I've been writing Ember code and learning, and making plenty of mistakes. I've loved every minute of it.

To be clear, I was a huge Ember skeptic last year. I've lived through the Microsoft WPF and Silverlight attempts to bring bindings and all that goodness to developers before, and then watch them make it so complex and poorly documented that no one used it, and they died except on banking LOB apps. I worried that the same would be true of Ember.

So I started to give it a crack of the whip, and really use it to build an ambitious (at least for me) product. Yes, it's been tough, and yes at the moment there is an almost Wittgenstein-esque 'throw the ladder away once you have climbed it', but I've never felt so productive with a product that looks and works really well. My conversion came when I finally had something click, was able to start removing bunches of code and lean on Ember to co-ordinate almost everything.

I recently had a run-in with Ember Data that left me really frustrated, and now (today even) I'm re-learning and checking my assumptions and to be honest, I think the problem was my understanding and not Ember Data. That said, it is clearly marked DNUIP, so if you do use it in production, you should be prepared for a bumpy road.

I am an illustrator, turned front end developer, turned "just get it done" rails developer. I am currently working on a basic forum for a website that is 100% Ember powered.

Before finding Ember, I created "islands of richness" with Backbone.js. What was frustrating for me was my own lack of software engineering skills. I would design these hard to maintain apps that were just an absolute mess at the end. Like Rails, Ember opened this world of application development that has been such an absolute thrill to get into. It teaches me good practices, you instantly feel when you're doing something wrong.

I have been working with Ember every day for the past two months, and yea there are times that I get lost and it's frustrating, like struggling with complex forms in Rails for the first time, but you eventually move past it and the feeling is gratifying. I'm not the best dev in the world, but Ember has shifted my vision on what I can create completely, and I am really excited for the first time in a while.

For me, Ember isn't just a framework, I find myself using the Ember runtime everywhere. Where I used to take Backbone models and collections, I know take Ember core - even in a Node environment.

I really appreciate what Tom and Yehuda have done as well as the rest of the community. It has me excited to create in this new way I had not been able to before.

Discourse doesn't use ember data and it has been an absolute pleasure to code in EmberJS. I think a lot of people don't realize just how simple it is to create an Ember object from an AJAX call and start using it. A finder is usually as simple as:

$.get("/user/eviltrout.json").then(function(json) { Discourse.User.create(json) });

I'll probably end up writing up an AJAX tutorial because I think a lot of people are underestimating just how simple it is.

The original SproutCore was pretty close to rails-level usability. At least, it helped frame up controllers and views with a handy tool.