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Why is Ember fading away?

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Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#41

Post by 3pt14159 »

I'll take a counter view here.

Ember shines best when building very UI rich, complex front end apps. Not apps that need to work on shitty connections or devices. Apps you would use from your office in NY or Toronto.

But the sad fact is that there just aren't that many frontend apps out there, relatively speaking. Ember is hard to learn because you need to learn a lot to get things done, and most people building something simple are lazy. By the time their project is a huge mess they're already locked in. Take HN for instance, the tech powering it is dead simple. It doesn't need to be giant frontend app.

Ember is a really solid framework that I love that is never going away, but it isn't for everyone and that is ok. Ember devs make a higher salary because they generally need to know more and the apps are more maintainable and generally run by pro dev shops, but it's not for everyone.

One thing I think that could really help Ember is a version of Rails or some other backend that required less mucking around to get everything working. It's such a chore to fully follow JSON API v1.1. But relation links and cursor based pagination are great with tools like Ember Data, so it's worth the effort.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#42

Post by rublev »

atonse wrote: post #31

I still strongly favor Ember for exactly the reasons React and other frameworks simply haven't caught up: the out of the box experience. I can start building an actual app within 3 minutes of typing "ember new" – with React, I'd spend the first couple of days just fiddling around with build scripts. Sure, there are now react boilerplates that do this, but there are too many out there to properly evaluate what to use.…

>with React, I'd spend the first couple of days just fiddling around with build scripts.

Yeah a long time ago now. Since July 2016 create-react-app has been available, there are many other scaffolding tools as well.

>Sure, there are now react boilerplates that do this, but there are too many out there to properly evaluate what to use.

Use the one provided by the creators, facebook.

Why not just make it a part of the framework?

React is small (ok, "small"), you can use it out of the box without any build scripts. It doesn't make sense to package it up.

And speaking as someone who's done React for a couple years now and had to port old rails codebases to api-only / react views... yuck, never again. Rails is cluncky and most of the devs I worked with didn't know how anything works 'under the hood'.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#43

Post by anoncoward778 »

barrkel wrote: post #5
_m8fo wrote: post #3

The premise seems to be that popularity is what's important. I'd say the useful metric is whether or not you can be productive with the tool at hand. Popularity is sometimes something that can make a framework more productive (as tutorials, documentation and libraries are released), however popularity is hardly a prerequisite.

Popularity is important if you want to hire developers - developers are generally less interested in moving their career in a different direction than the industry trends. Popularity for frameworks is also important if the framework needs adapters to enable third-party libraries to work with the framework. Depending on how opinionated the framework is, the friction in embedding libraries may hamper productivity indir…

"Popularity is important if you want to hire developers" 15+ year vet here. I'd have to disagree. Popularity is important if you want to hire green developers. Not if you want good ones.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#44

Post by shard972 »

anoncoward778 wrote: post #30
realty_geek wrote: post #18

I invested a lot of my time over the last few years into Ember and though it was a difficult decision I eventually had to accept that I would be better off moving to Vue.js. I have written a bit about my decision here: https://hackernoon.com/why-i-am-migrating-propertywebbuilder... Its a shame but the reality is that ember will not stand the test of time.

"...will not stand the test of time" Based upon what math do you qualify that statement? What equations do you apply to support this?

Since when did such a statement rely on hard emperical evidence?

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#45

Post by ythn »

heckanoobs wrote: post #16

I think there is a lot of tribalism in the js community and liking one framework (often the one you use for work) is synonymous with hating the others. Take this survey done where the people who have "heard of Ember and would NOT use it" is completely outsized with the rest of the data. ( https://stateofjs.com/2017/front-end/results/ ) I've been developing professionally for 15 years and even in that short a time I'v…

> I think there is a lot of tribalism in the js community and liking one framework

Judging by the fossil thread the other day, I'm guessing there is tribalism in any area that requires "investment" to learn/master. The "Git" tribe has a very strong band of loyal followers unwilling to see the merits of other VCSs, ditto for [insert favorite VCS] followers

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#46

Post by parthdesai »

tashoecraft wrote: post #22
senoroink wrote: post #15

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 d…

You may want to look at Angular. They adopted the ember cli to create a standard way of starting a project and organizing it.

but then you have to use Angular. You pay performance penalties and as someone who learnt React before Angular, two way data binding doesn't make that much sense. ( i know angular 4 uses state based model, but then might as well use react at that point.)

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#47

Post by heckanoobs »

coldtea wrote: post #25
heckanoobs wrote: post #16

I think there is a lot of tribalism in the js community and liking one framework (often the one you use for work) is synonymous with hating the others. Take this survey done where the people who have "heard of Ember and would NOT use it" is completely outsized with the rest of the data. ( https://stateofjs.com/2017/front-end/results/ ) I've been developing professionally for 15 years and even in that short a time I'v…

> I think there is a lot of tribalism in the js community and liking one framework (often the one you use for work) is synonymous with hating the others. As in nature in general, it helps, from an evolutionary standpoint. Having too many, and letting them all be, instead of people rooting for their favorite and having one or two emerge as the leaders, leads to dispersion of resources, confusion for newcomers, and mul…

There's no reason you can't have a 5/5 framework with huge community and support.

Tribalism leads to choosing between two hobbled solutions because it closes the door on teamwork across tribes. Ember has its flaws but their upgrade strategy is world class. Every maintainer of an open source project should at least be familiar; but how can that happen when ppl happily report they "have heard of Ember and would NOT use it"?

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#48

Post by simonw »

atonse wrote: post #31

I still strongly favor Ember for exactly the reasons React and other frameworks simply haven't caught up: the out of the box experience. I can start building an actual app within 3 minutes of typing "ember new" – with React, I'd spend the first couple of days just fiddling around with build scripts. Sure, there are now react boilerplates that do this, but there are too many out there to properly evaluate what to use.…

I started using React properly a year ago and I was dreading having to tinker with scripts for 72 hours.

The developer experience I got from create-react-app was astounding - it gave me the most productive frontend experience (live reloading, preconfigured Babel) I've ever had.

These days I turn to React for quick throwaway projects because I know create-react-app will have me up and running straight away.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#49

Post by mar225 »

We us Ember at my company. We started using it around the 1.0 release. We have been very happy with it. But as a shop that doesn't really have any dedicated front end developers the most frustrating thing for us is that their conventions are always changing or worse threatening to change but don't so your left always wondering if what you are doing is the right thing. People have been waiting for controllers to be deprecated for years. That being said I think they do have to make these changes to keep the framework moving forward and I appreciate the amount of effort they put in to keep things backward compatible. I think now that they are providing code mods for a lot of the new conventions people won't be as hesitant to upgrade. Before there was a lot of friction when upgrading to a new version that had different conventions and you felt you should go and modify your existing code to follow the new conventions. I have confidence that with their strong user base they will stay relevant for many types of applications. If people are hesitant to try it I'd tell them to keep in mind that even though Ember has conventions and provides the ember way of doing things it is possible to integrate most of the exciting things going on in the js world with Ember. Some people even use react components in their ember apps.
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