Ember has been freakin' amazing to use, and Octane really, really, makes it shine. I love ember because it includes everything you need to manage state in your application, install and you're ready to go. I don't have to pick my view renderer, state/history management, storage system, networking stack etc... I also don't have to maintain the dependencies between them, like I would with something built using React.
Ember also favors convention over configuration; which, I find to be a godsend when visiting the world of JavaScript. Yeah, it's a bit painful sometimes not knowing the convention, but that's just good ol' fashion learning. I also think the opposite, configuration, is incredibly painful in JavaScript, because the ecosystem moves so fast.
The Ember team (and community) also have fixed, and continue to fix, a ton of issues from making module loading easier to better support of Typescript.
I'd like to give a few getting started tips for anyone about to jump in (as I did the same a few months ago):
* Glimmer templates give you nice HTML-esque looking components while separating the HTML from the JavaScript itself (which I like versus embedding it like JSX does)
* Use the decorators. Seriously, they're awesome, they're a MUST if you use typescript.
* Ember modifiers are really a big improvement over the previous hooks/lifecycle management. It's just the constructor and willDestory (I think), it also to me, makes it a lot easy to commit to ol' "data down, actions up" philosophy.
* Ember Concurrency [1] is a brilliant tool and can pretty much prevent any UI blocking you ever find yourself doing.
* Some things are automagically created for you unless you explicitly create them (with the right names) like the application controller and application router. Use the Ember debugger browser plugin to see what controllers and routes are being rendered if you're at all unsure.
* Ember CSS modules [2] helped me quite a lot encapsulating css (and wiring it up correctly for that matter).
* Use Mirage [3] to mock out your data from the beginning, don't hard code things you intend to query for later. You'll have trouble, plus Mirage is super easy to use.
* Make sure guides you're reading are relevant to the current version. Octane has been coming for a while so there's a fair bit of information, it's just something to be aware of (especially from results in google).
* If you're reading an older article that's relevant, but using older syntax try reading this: https://blog.emberjs.com/2019/01/26/emberjs-native-class-upd...
This series of articles is also immensely helpful: https://www.pzuraq.com/coming-soon-in-ember-octane-part-1-na...
Finally, I've found the Ember community to be incredibly nice and welcoming. Their Discord [4] is very active and full of helpful folks. Huge props and thanks to everyone who worked on this, it's super exciting and I'm gonna go hack on my Ember project now.
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[1] https://ember-concurrency.com/
[2] https://github.com/salsify/ember-css-modules
[3] https://www.ember-cli-mirage.com/
[4] https://discord.gg/emberjs
Edit: Formatting.