Why I love Ember.js
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Why I love Ember.js
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Re: Why I love Ember.js
#2This is great insight, thanks.
Re: Why I love Ember.js
#3I agree with most of this, Ember.js is great. However, I'm not so sure on ember-data. It seems like it has great potential and will eventually turn out to be excellent but currently I've found it to be very frustrating when you actually try and use it.
To me ember-data is currently either you use it exactly as we specify and it might work but if you attempt to do anything that even slightly deviates from this then you're pretty much out of luck.
Firstly, it has a trivial to challenging barrier of entry depending on your skills/environment; it requires a working ruby environment and the ability to build ember-data from the git repo.
Then once you start using ember-data you'll most likely find yourself running in to all sorts of problems that involve you delving into the source code to find out what on earth is going off (no docs). Also I fell in to the trap of assuming that ember-data should do something and trying to figure out what was wrong with my implementation when it turns out it can't actually do that. For example, ember-data does not automatically update hasMany collections when you fetch a model with a corresponding belongsTo. Because of this you have to specify every single id of the related models for your hasMany relationship in the parent model's JSON and good luck trying to hack your way around this by appending models to the hasMany collection yourself.
As I said though, it does appear to have promise and to be fair it does not claim to be ready for production. However, I think it is a bit early to be attaching words like "love" to ember-data just yet. Ember.js on the other hand currently seems excellent and when ember-data becomes production ready I think they'll make for a very powerful combo.
Re: Why I love Ember.js
#4I agree with most of this, Ember.js is great. However, I'm not so sure on ember-data. It seems like it has great potential and will eventually turn out to be excellent but currently I've found it to be very frustrating when you actually try and use it. To me ember-data is currently either you use it exactly as we specify and it might work but if you attempt to do anything that even slightly deviates from this then yo…
Thank you for the detailed feedback. Working on Ember Data has been one of the most challenging efforts of my career, but I think that it has the opportunity to dramatically change how people write web applications. Once we've stabilized it, of course. :)
Here are the specific steps we're taking to address your concerns:
1. Thanks to a pull request from Stanley Stuart[1], we now automatically publish builds of Ember Data[2] every time a new commit is pushed that passes our suite of tests.
2. We have begun documenting Ember Data[3] and, while not exhaustive, what we have now is significantly better than just a little while ago. As with what happened with Ember.js, we take documentation very seriously and you should see the Ember Data documentation improve dramatically over time.
3. As we outlined in a recent blog post[4], we are focused on stabilizing Ember Data and do not have plans for new features at this time. If we made a mistake in the initial API design, it was not providing enough imperative trap doors to use when the declarative APIs were not sufficient. We are working on fixing that.
Thanks to our friends at Addepar, we are able to dedicate several full days per week to Ember Data and you should see the velocity of the project increase significantly. Many observers have noticed the recent flurry of commit activity[5]; this was not an aberration but an indication of what the future holds now that we have daytime hours to dedicate to it.
If you have specific suggestions for how to make Ember Data as approachable as possible, please let me know. Like I said, my focus right now is on eliminating bugs, stabilizing APIs, and making sure new developers don't hit frustrating rough spots.
1: https://github.com/emberjs/data/pull/850
2: https://s3.amazonaws.com/builds.emberjs.com/ember-data-lates...
3: http://emberjs.com/guides/models/
4: http://emberjs.com/blog/2013/03/22/stabilizing-ember-data.ht...
Re: Why I love Ember.js
#5... So you love EmberJS because backbone was the only thing you used before and the only thing you have to compare against?
I've used both Angular and Ember extensively, and AngularJS trounces on EmberJS in both performance and ease of use.
Re: Why I love Ember.js
#6Other than Ember Data, it seems like all the pieces here are things that marionette has. I was super interested to read this, swinging more towards marionette myself, just to get a perspective on what convinced you to change. But there really wasn't much comparion, it seemed to just be you going over the features of ember.
If you don't mind answering here, what made you go so strongly with ember over marionette?
Re: Why I love Ember.js
#7That's something I could have written a few months ago before discovering Angular.js. Now, I have no reasons and no desire to go back to Ember.
Re: Why I love Ember.js
#8I agree with most of this, Ember.js is great. However, I'm not so sure on ember-data. It seems like it has great potential and will eventually turn out to be excellent but currently I've found it to be very frustrating when you actually try and use it. To me ember-data is currently either you use it exactly as we specify and it might work but if you attempt to do anything that even slightly deviates from this then yo…
Thank you for the detailed feedback. Working on Ember Data has been one of the most challenging efforts of my career, but I think that it has the opportunity to dramatically change how people write web applications. Once we've stabilized it, of course. :) Here are the specific steps we're taking to address your concerns: 1. Thanks to a pull request from Stanley Stuart[1], we now automatically publish builds of Ember…
I also plan on doing some work to make sure that ActiveModel::Serializers will always work with the latest version of Ember Data. I've been spending much of my OSS time on Resque lately, but this is in my pipeline.
Re: Why I love Ember.js
#9That's something I could have written a few months ago before discovering Angular.js. Now, I have no reasons and no desire to go back to Ember.
The main reason why I'm considering giving ember another shot is discourse (discourse.org), which is a pretty large open-source app written in rails and ember. Having a large app that one can reference is pretty invaluable. I'm not aware of any larger apps written in angular.
Re: Why I love Ember.js
#10Other than Ember Data, it seems like all the pieces here are things that marionette has. I was super interested to read this, swinging more towards marionette myself, just to get a perspective on what convinced you to change. But there really wasn't much comparion, it seemed to just be you going over the features of ember. If you don't mind answering here, what made you go so strongly with ember over marionette?
One of the major factors in the debate was community support. Marionette is built on top of Backbone, which meant depending on support of two separate projects. Ember.js, on the other hand is by a single developer. Kind of like why people prefer buying Nexus phones. They are the first ones to officially get updated with the latest Android version. Others might take months before the handset manufacturer decides to update them.
Also, we were certain that we needed view hierarchies, and Marionette provided them too. Back in the day though, it was still in its early stages, and we couldn't really count on it. "What if an API change broke our app with the next upgrade?" we thought. Ember.js on the other hand was pretty much frozen and as in a 1.0 pre2 version. Also, there were many options available, Backbone+Marionette or Backbone+Thorax? It was confusing.