I lead an internal development team. We're constant building new apps and enhancing old ones.
Ember has been a big win for us. Upgrading old apps is a breeze. Every app has a consistent structure and the conventions make it easy for developers to move between projects. We don't need to worry about the individual pieces - routing, data, etc - we trust the core devs so that we only worry about business logic. We're experimenting with Ember Engines right now and I'm not sure how we'd replicate it if we were using React or Angular. All in all, I think it has made us incredibly productive.
Outside of the code, the Ember team's communication skills are top notch. I feel like every time I tell my team that "XYZ is coming down the pipe", there's a clear plan of attack and any impact is minimal. In the last 3 years, I've never had to tell my boss that development will be paused to focus on a refactor/upgrade/maintenance.
The biggest downside is in hiring, unfortunately. I don't look for Ember experience, but I have had to adjust my expectations when it comes to the learning curve.
> Outside of the code, the Ember team's communication skills are top notch. I feel like every time I tell my team that "XYZ is coming down the pipe", there's a clear plan of attack and any impact is minimal. In the last 3 years, I've never had to tell my boss that development will be paused to focus on a refactor/upgrade/maintenance.
Really? We had the exact opposite experience with major upcoming refactors that were poorly handled. Deprecating controllers, adding routable controllers, multiple changes in the rendering systems (handlebars, htmlbars, glimmer), and lots of confusion around coordinating release of core, data, and cli.
Enjoyed most things outside of that though. Learning curve early on was rough, but now it seems a lot better and looks they are rallying back up for good improvements after the 3.0 release.
1.x to 2.0 was a little rough, but so much better than the "all apps left behind" approach of Angular 1.x to 2.0. Ember's 2.x to 3.0 upgrade path was much improved as earlier mistakes were learned from.
Trajectory matters, and Ember had got a really great trajectory for apps that value longevity now.
Maybe it's because we're slower on the release cycle? We stick to LTS and a little extra depending on our workload. We also committed to using controllers thinking it would be easy to convert to routable components later on, when the routable components never landed it made our lives easier.
Otherwise, I haven't paid attention to the core,data, and cli release schedules.
The thing that has most impressed me about Ember is the way the teams on a project at giant corp will not do things correctly (honestly, some days it feels like they are doing weird crap on purpose to try to get it to fail) and Ember still works.
For a tiny glimpse of context- we have globally distributed teams who all work on different (isolated) parts of the project using ember-engines. All of these parts can either be stood up as a standalone app or become part of one host app. And every single one of these is consuming a single UI Addon that has components, minimal services, and themes.
Think about all of the moving pieces there, all of the parts where teams can disagree or do weird stuff, and yet somehow when it all comes together, we have so many things that could colossally fail, yet nothing does. We have a few bugs that are hard to reproduce but that's because we do weird stuff, not because Ember does. It's really epic when I sit back and think through all of it.
If you haven't tried Ember in ages, or ever- this is definitely the time to try...and I mean really try. Some of it will be a paradigm shift, but a worthy one.
(as someone who doesn't use ember) This release looks cool, and I like the general vibe of careful development and clear messaging.
Is anyone here using Ember on big projects? How's it working out?
I tried ember, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, and was turned off by some weird magical behaviour, but I'm curious about how ember is doing these days, and particularly the glimmer engine.
Ember is an incredible framework that's been carefully thought out by a team of super sharp people with loads of experience, and I'm constantly amazed by how quickly I can get real projects built using it. I've used it for many projects since ember-cli came out a few years ago. I feel about Ember for client-side projects how I felt about Rails for server-side projects—it made it fun for me again.
But Ember gets a bad wrap from the internet because (admittedly) their marketing materials with the gooofy chipmunks make it look like a toy while React's make it look like you're learning quantum physics. And then there's the timeless "convention over configuration" divide where Ember people are generally on the left side, and React people just love the thought of fiddling around and hand rolling their own custom ungoogleable bespoke artisan framework before actually getting to the meat of the work.
I highly recommend using Ember for any size project if you like getting shit done.
I don't think Ember's bad rap is due to its marketing image. First off, Ember long had a reputation for being less performant out of all frontend frameworks. It was mostly true for some time, but Ember is pretty fast these days.
More importantly, I think that frontend development still is influenced by its long history of "duct tape" coding practices resulting from JavaScript and CSS being very crippled for much of their existence. Thus, many JavaScript developers seem to prefer simple libraries that can do a lot with a little investment in configuration and composition.
Of course there's also the fact that Tilde is the most notable supporter of Ember, whereas Angular has Google and React has Facebook.
But some people, such as myself, like an opinionated toolchain such as Ember.
Given that even after a major overhaul, Linkedin's web interface is sub-par wrt. UX as well as performance, I am not sure Linkedin's endorsement really contributes positively towards popularity of Ember.
Totally agree. I love ember but linked in’s new ember interface just makes my Laptop fans spin like crazy.
I worry because I know they’ve hired some of the most talented folks from the Ember community (people who care about performance and scrolling jankyness). This is not a knock on them, but it is worrying that even the best of the best may struggle with larger, more complex apps.
> But Ember gets a bad wrap from the internet because (admittedly) their marketing materials with the gooofy chipmunks make it look like a toy
Ember.js is best technology that I've ever dropped, but let me assure you, the Tomster had nothing to do with my decision.
Ember got into the spotlight when Atwood and Co. have launched the Discourse. Back then it looked super impressive - first open source forum software and arguably one of first open source apps following "JS fronted and API backend" architecture. And it was all done with Ember.js, js FW marketing itself as the modern way to build JS apps!
A lot of people wanted to try it out (myself included), some moving from Angular, other from Backbone, and others coming from backend development. If Ember ever had the cool factor, it was that time. Ember.js was the next big thing, a framework for creating
ambitious web applications, and all the people came to it to build their ambitious applications, looking up to Discourse as example of such application.
And then those people have hit the roadblock. Ember.js's pitch was building applications, but it's documentation has never moved past explaining individual parts of technology, and into the field of how those should be put together in final application. Angular had millions of easily googleable tutorials like "this is best practice for setting page title when user enters the route" or "this is how you can configure framework to authenticate with your backend technology".
I also clearly remember the "calling set on destroyed object" error that happened when you tried to update the state of object that was already destroyed that was impossible to debug, because the error was literally "Error: calling set on destroyed object" and it put world to stop. For comparision, in React.js that was "Warning: calling setState with X, Y and Z on unmounted component ComponentName". That one error was absolute productivity killer when debugging Ember.js apps from day one, and it was years before somebody from Ember.js core actually went to Ember's source code and changed "assert !obj._is_destroyed 'calling set on destroyed object'" to "assert !obj._is_destroyed 'calling set on destroyed object'". There was always bigger fish to fry for Ember.js core team, who were so bussy making blogpost after blogpost of new great features or API changes happening, while being oblivious to comments below those same blogposts asking "can I now do partial updates on models because they are super costful to update?" or "is calling set on destroyed object fixed yet?". And then guys from their ambassador product, Discourse, started writing blog posts following the pattern of "Here's how we've replaced Ember.js's feature with our one because framework's didnt work", and those involved things like `Ember-Data` or Ember views.
EmberJS was the first front-end framework I learned as a web developer, shortly after learning Django. This was before Ember 1.0 . It was cool at first - but once I started developing real projects I ran head first into unreadable or cryptic internal stack traces and APIs that forced me to adapt my back-end to fit the needs of the front-end app. A short time later I picked up angular 1.x and was off to the races because anytime I ran into a problem with a feature or design decision I could easily find the hack that would keep my momentum going.
I always felt like EmberJS meant well but chose rigidness where it should have been flexible, and flexibility where it should have been rigid. It's probably changed and solved many of these early problems. I want to go back and re-evaluate, but nowadays so many different technologies, frameworks, languages, and tools, are pulling at my time that I don't think I will be able to.
FWIW my current stack of choice (and at work) is Golang and Vue (w/Typescript) - which might identify where some of my biases and predilections are.
We've been using Ember at Intercom for over 4 years to build our main app.
We continue to be super productive with Ember, our customers love our product, our code base has never been healthier and Ember's careful upgrade path and approach to deprecations means that we don't spend much energy or time thinking about non-product related technical challenges. The 6 week release cycle is great.
We've grown from 10 to 150 engineers in that time and Ember's strong conventions has helped us continue our tradition of enabling new engineers shipping to production on their first day and shipping a feature to production in their first week.
We started on ~v1.4. Ember has improved in every dimension since then. ember-cli, the ember inspector, contextual components, data down actions up, much better docs, an open RFC process, the ember addon ecosystem, the experimental glimmerjs, a smooth approach to deprecations and major version released. A lot of small steps and the odd big leap really adds up.
Performance is great now. The rendering engine has been rebuilt (without major changes to the templating syntax) and the new glimmer-vm architecture yielded huge performance and payload size wins and continues to deliver incremental performance gains every 6 weeks.
I've never considered error reporting an issue in the past, but I may just not remember the pain. It's not an issue for us now though.
If you (or anyone else reading) would ever like to chat in person, feel free to reach out:
I don’t work there, but was an early customer and have built apps from 1.x days.
The things that have improved:
1. Performance, performance, performance. It’s not fair, but anything that existed before react really was slow, because all JS dom updating was basically .innerHtml. Once we (as a JS community left that), everything has gotten faster (especially ember). Seehttps://madhatted.com/2016/11/30/5-things-to-know-about-embe...
2. Composability of components: being able to compose components together dynamically based and have a well defined boundary for colmunicating with the outside world is great. There is still some papercuts with the actual component API, but those are getting smoothed out.
3. Build-tooling/ecosystem. The amount and quality of tools keeps going up to accomplish tree shaking, AST parsing, etc. I just updated an ember app from 2.3 -> 3.0 and it took less than 2 hours to upgrade, test, deploy.
The most recent large effort in the 3.0 series was to break apart all of the 'magic features' into coherent conceptual units. So if you know what you want you can now use only the magic dust that you think you need. But those units are also still part of the ember such that it's still possible to type '>ember new' and have a fully loaded ready-to-go framework in 10 seconds.
And fastboot.
And glimmer.
It's really nice environment to work in when building a full featured web-app.
We use Ember, and it works pretty good actually. I love the addons system which allows you to speed up, but also extend an addon at anytime if it doesn't exactly fit your case. But the great thing with Ember is that anyone of us can jump in a project never worked before and still be productive. I had written a blog post about it, maybe worth checking it out: https://blog.kollegorna.se/3-years-of-ember-6-months-of-reac...
I've used ember to build a half dozen production apps, ranging from a wysiwyg vector editor to a dropbox clone to an electron-based process manager. It's the frontend framework I reach for any time I expect to need to develop an app longer than a month or two, and ember has scaled well with each project. The ember community conventions have never really gotten in the way of whatever I'm trying to accomplish, and the consistency across projects is refreshing.
Similar to @s_kilk I tried ember years ago and while I liked some of their concepts, the hard learning curve and the oversized results made me search alternatives.
Anybody knows what size (js bundle file size) a basic PWA in ember.js has nowadays?
I am asking for file size here, as transmitting and parsing that data is usually what defers an instant user interaction.
It will deliver a minimum HTML-payload to quickly render a page, then subsequently load the data required to boot the full app after the page has loaded.
The net effect is that page transitions/loading will be more or less instant.
Keep in mind. Ember is built for LARGE applications. No such thing as a "basic PWA" in ember.js. Think of it more like...we've built this huge app for tons of users in library XYZ and our development team of over 20 persons is feeling pain points in transitioning to the updated more secure version of XYZ.
I really enjoyed the EmberConf talk about movie studios using it for movie promo sites because they needed to be able to get them up quickly. I think if you took that concept and maybe a blog post about doing an Ember PWA (https://madhatted.com/2017/6/16/building-a-progressive-web-a... for example) then maybe the large part doesn't matter so much...
My team is actually in the process of de-Reacting our code base. These frameworks are full of hacks underneath the covers, and their abstractions are mostly ill-specified.
Apart from the very annoying Event compatibility layer with its event pooling and central handling that breaks the usual DOM event bubbling, I never saw something bad enough that would make someone consider de-Reacting.
As much as I dislike magic, JS libs working with the DOM will always have code that isn't as clean as your application code.
Ember has been a big win for us. Upgrading old apps is a breeze. Every app has a consistent structure and the conventions make it easy for developers to move between projects. We don't need to worry about the individual pieces - routing, data, etc - we trust the core devs so that we only worry about business logic. We're experimenting with Ember Engines right now and I'm not sure how we'd replicate it if we were using React or Angular. All in all, I think it has made us incredibly productive.
Outside of the code, the Ember team's communication skills are top notch. I feel like every time I tell my team that "XYZ is coming down the pipe", there's a clear plan of attack and any impact is minimal. In the last 3 years, I've never had to tell my boss that development will be paused to focus on a refactor/upgrade/maintenance.
The biggest downside is in hiring, unfortunately. I don't look for Ember experience, but I have had to adjust my expectations when it comes to the learning curve.