Why is Ember fading away?

I am a junior frontend dev working on my first dev job and both the main web apps (customer facing web app and internal tools web app) are in Ember.

I like it, I could do real, valuable (if small) contributions within a month. I am 9 months in it now and I can handle significantly more complex features.

As it was explained to me, this was part of the decision of choosing Ember.

I will try to list the reasons for us:

- Timing: it was a time when the Angular broken upgrade from 1 to 2 was happening and React was starting to get traction.

- Ember was a solid and mature framework, stable enough to use on a startup with product-market fit entering the growth phase.

- There were clear signs that the framework was not going to be abandoned by its developers. Not only the maturity, but its future seemed solid. In retrospect, this was right. Ember keeps staying as a modern framework (even if not hyped that way).

- Its "conventions over configuration" approach was very important as we hadn't enough experienced software developers in the team. It made it welcoming to junior developers (like myself) that could not properly anticipate all the possible outcomes of early configuration and architectural decisions. React is very tricky in this aspect. I believe a lot of React applications being created these days by not so experience engineers will cause a lot of problems in the future.

The downside is mostly human capital. Hard to find Ember developers these days. But not such a big deal, as our hiring policy focus on more fundamental frontend skills rather than framework knowledge, so we hired good frontend developers that first got in touch with Ember here. And it is fairly easy to pick up Ember for junior and senior developers both.

That said, talking to some senior developers here, it appears that, were they doing that decision today, they would probably go with React. Being easier to attract new hires is a big deal of that decision, as we are growing a lot our development team and if we could offer React options we would certainly attract an order of magnitude more candidates.

Also, React is more mature and we have more developers that are experienced enough to make the right calls on its architecture and configuration.

But, my personal opinion, is that Ember would still be the right choice for our situation today. Something solid, with a large enough range of problems already solved, welcoming to new developers, easy enough to be productive from start.

It came and went, plain and simple. It made assumptions and design choices which at the time seemed sound but by today’s standards look silly. Mustache templates for instance. Separating logic from presentation should be a choice not a hard/fast rule with a severely limited templating engine.

As someone who has moved from using Ember daily for 2+ years to now using React/Redux, I miss Ember on a daily basis. React suffers from lack of standardization like no other. I hate starting a new project or working on an existing project and having to think about where to put things. Ember grew from developers who existed in the Rails space and understood that convention over configuration is the way to go. React devs likely came from Express land where everything is composed of tiny modules that you'll spend days carefully putting them all together.

The React world is the wild west. Libraries come and go so quickly that you're better off building it yourself if you see your app as long living. Ember, on the other hand, does a great job of keeping everything in check. Because the community is so small, things just work because there's less things to maintain.

Admittedly, when I first got into Ember, it was pre 1.0 days. Even prior to v2.0, Ember struggled to keep things working as intended. Now that the framework has matured, most pain points have gone away. The way they do their versioning is the smartest in the industry. React has been around for years and still the community seems fragmented.

What it boils down to is:

Is your app fairly small and intended to only last about a year? Use React

Is your app core to your business used by many and intended to last for the foreseeable future? Use Ember

Right now there are three main frameworks. Angular, React, and, Vue.

Ember has always been the little guy even in the days when Backbone dominated. But it seems to have been replaced by Vue in this regard.

Ember felt very Rails-y to me. The ember community felt entrenched in rails, and rails is reaching end-of-life. It is old-school thought. Ember made existing ideas better, a 2x gain maybe. I want new ideas, the 100x leap.