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Why is Ember fading away?

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Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#51

Post by hardwaresofton »

In my mind, if you need a large framework that a whole team can use day in and day out, Ember is the go-to choice. It's got a lot of batteries included and the learning curve is pretty steep, but it has patterns and a way to do things for just about everything. It's also been rapidly absorbing the best parts of other frameworks and approaches -- fastboot, glimmer, etc.

- Angular had the spot, then bumbled the transition from 1->2->5.

- Durandal died/was transformed into Aurelia, whose hype never materialized.

- Backbone +/- Marionette seems to be in super slow decline, but doesn't update as fast as Ember.

- I don't know much about Polymer but it just seems like an interesting project, not something I'd suggest an org to use (I'm probably wrong).

Ember shouldn't be compared to tools like React/Vue because it's almost never just React/Vue, and Ember itself has lots of plugins that come into play. "React" =~ React + React-Router + Redux/Reflux/Fluxxor/Flux/whatever, and roughly the same with Vue -- though you can choose to extend Ember with plugins, by default everything you need is baked in, with ONE set of well-written if not long documentation. I can certainly say that Ember is more coherently put together than react/vue + react-router/vue-router + redux/vuex.

One of the biggest problems with ember of course, is the breakneck pace of change. I think it's slowed down somewhat recently, but keeping up with it can feel like a full time job sometimes, if you get stuck behind for too long, it gets harder and harder to update your codebase.

As far as I'm concerned, Ember should keep doing what it's doing, it's basically the only worthwhile competitor these days in the most-batteries-included (aka frontend framework rather than frontend library) space. If anything these days, Angular (5?) is looking like it's pivoted it's way to essentially emulating Ember, so I'd place it second.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#52

Post by maxsilver »

abledon wrote: post #32

I'm just going to say it: Their mascot was an annoying hamster. This was their downfall. Angular, sexy geometric design. React, sexy nuclear design. Vue, Sexy V geometric design. Ember, a big goofy rodent looking at you lol. "But abledon, what about GOlang? they have a rodent too?" Yes but golang resides in backend land where designers and frontend visual brains are lacking, only performance matters, doesnt matter if…

I hate that this is the defining thing people look for in their front end libraries.

But it is.

A lot of how "clean" or "modern" people think a given library is, is driven almost entirely by it's marketing homepage and only loosely tied to the actual experience of using it.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#53

Post by zerr »

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.…

How does it compare to Angular 5?

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#54

Post by StevePerkins »

abledon wrote: post #32

I'm just going to say it: Their mascot was an annoying hamster. This was their downfall. Angular, sexy geometric design. React, sexy nuclear design. Vue, Sexy V geometric design. Ember, a big goofy rodent looking at you lol. "But abledon, what about GOlang? they have a rodent too?" Yes but golang resides in backend land where designers and frontend visual brains are lacking, only performance matters, doesnt matter if…

I think it's more about corporate sponsorship and branding.

Angular is seen as "The Google Solution" (disregarding that Google doesn't actually use it as much as people think). React is seen as "The Facebook Solution". Ember is more decentralized, and lacking a strong primary champion/sponsor. Something that developers SAY we like in open source projects, but which frankly doesn't really match our actions so much.

I chuckled a bit at the parent comment, but I won't say that logos don't matter to front-end developers (half of the HN discussion threads about a link seem to be about its font and CSS choices rather than its substantive content). But that's only a slice of what I think is the overall reason. Ember just doesn't have strong corporate brand muscle behind it.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#55

Post by senoroink »

saurik wrote: post #28
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…

Why did you stop using Ember?

I switched jobs to get something closer to home and the new job was a React shop.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#56

Post by senoroink »

coldtea wrote: post #23
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…

> 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. And it shouldn't even have to sacrifice it's "open/modular" nature to fix that. The core team (Dan, etc) could just adopt/suggest a…

Sure they could but they haven't, yet.

And there doesn't seem to be anything on the radar to do so. While I've played with enough boilerplate projects in the React/Redux world, there's nothing considered to be officially supported and even the most popular ones have stagnant development.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#57

Post by jobvandervoort »

ythn wrote: post #36
abledon wrote: post #32

I'm just going to say it: Their mascot was an annoying hamster. This was their downfall. Angular, sexy geometric design. React, sexy nuclear design. Vue, Sexy V geometric design. Ember, a big goofy rodent looking at you lol. "But abledon, what about GOlang? they have a rodent too?" Yes but golang resides in backend land where designers and frontend visual brains are lacking, only performance matters, doesnt matter if…

This is probably the same reason GitLab transitioned from a goofy looking mspaint mongoose to a slick angular logo

People told us the logo was scary, that was a good motivator.

When we changed, I wrote about it: https://about.gitlab.com/2015/05/18/a-new-gitlab-logo/

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#58

Post by barrkel »

anoncoward778 wrote: post #43
barrkel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been coding for 25 years, getting paid for it for 21 years.

If you want to grow a team, you need to hire a mix of experience levels. With younger devs, talent is correlated with being opinionated - they have passion that hasn't been balanced by broad experience. And opinions are fashion-led. Find me a young dev who has no real opinions, and I'll show you a dev who has no taste.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#59

Post by antoniuschan99 »

myth_drannon wrote: post #24
antoniuschan99 wrote: post #17

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.

That's me understanding as well. NG and React are the top players and VueJS and EmberJS are niche. On stackoverflow jobs looks like around the end of 2017 Vue jobs > Ember jobs. http://reallyhyped.com/?keywords=vue.js%2Cember.js

Taking it a step further it seems to be broken down:

Enteprise - Angular

Startups and Larger Agencies - React

Smaller Agencies - Vue

Angular is dominant because large Enterprises are slow to adopt and Angular is really great because it works so well and everything is packaged out of the box.

React is still new compared to Angular which is why Startups are adopting it. Kind of like how Rails was popular with the Startups a few years ago.

Vue is universally loved by Developers but is not backed by the big companies in the States (it's bigger in China apparently?). It's considered Indie in North America so it's relegated to low budget projects.

Re: Why is Ember fading away?

#60

Post by chrisjshull »

I see a lot of people who like ember-cli, but after the first few minutes I just found it frustrating. Granted, this was a little over a year ago, but at that time if you simply wanted a npm module in your code you had to do all the extra work to wrap it in an ember plugin. IMO, this severely slowed down the ecosystem.
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