What the hell does Ember do? Is it another front-end MVC JS library? Is it a competitor to Node? Rails? CodeIgniter? "Ambitious web applications" tells me jack and I get no indication of what its "tremendous value" is.
Edit: That sounds a little more aggressive than I meant it to. If anyone can explain it without vomiting buzz words I'd love to understand because it seems intriguing.
My impression of it is that it's a front-end MVC library that's patterned more after the traditional MVC used in desktop/mobile apps than the Rails-style MVC that's ubiquitous on the server.
Ember has been undoubted advantage for our startup. Its at the core of our client code, there were glitches in learning and rework with Router V2 API but that is still ok in exchange of what we got. So far, we love that we chose EmberJS and we are getting better at using it. But we wish the community grows and people find it easier to adapt.
I agree it cannot be quantified, but what I was sharing was an experience of ending up with a jquery spaghetti, so with Ember we were able to maintain a code which is well segregated. Then the boiler plate which offers two way binding had been a much of a save of time. Again no way to quantify, if I could have shared the Github with you, we are not an open source.
It's great to see the Ember.js team focusing on these things as the framework approaches a 1.0 release. I've built a few apps on top of Ember over the past few months and that initial learning curve was what lead me to almost abandon it.
Also it's good to see the community filling in gaps that exist in the development process. I got introduced to ember_tools[1] just yesterday and it looks like a great way to provide Rails-style generators for Ember projects.
I put some effort into getting something working in Ember recently, and after the initial learning curve it did get a bit easier. I'm really glad that they've frozen the API and are getting to work on better documentation.
ok. fair enough. this is a good response and now the community is eager to see the update on this.
it would be fair to say that there are a number of developers out there who DO want to try EmberJS (myself included) and that's why there are so many passionate people commenting and discussing on the topic of difficulty in getting started with EmberJS.
So I'd say this is a good problem for EmberJS team to have. And hope you guys deliver, because imagine the sheer number of people who will be behind this project when that happens. :) Good luck! I plan to come back to it when I can get my brain around it!
> "Absolutely right. Ember promises—and, we think, delivers—tremendous value."
No matter how often you say it, doesn't make it true. At a certain point, we have to stop just believing the hype at face value, and start actually evaluating what the piece of software really does with a critical perspective.
Aren't the same guys who are telling you that Ember is simple and easy to use and high-performance and well-designed and ambitious and removes boilerplate and cures cancer and kisses babies ... the same guys who were saying the same things about SproutCore two years ago?
Isn't the data layer still totally unfinished? Didn't a lot of folks just get burned by wildly changing router APIs? Isn't it obvious from what few public production apps there are (after 2+ years) that the results end up sub-par, glitchy and wonky? Why would you want to spend time banging your head against the limitations and poor design choices of an over-marketed experimental framework?
Let them actually finish the damn thing first, then let's talk about "getting started" with it.
> Didn't a lot of folks just get burned by wildly changing router APIs?
"To keep things in perspective, we froze the Ember 1.0 API a mere month ago, when we released the first 1.0 RC. Before that, we were focused on iterating the API based on feedback we received from our early adopters. We believe that our willingness to change the API allowed us to build a better product than our competitors that locked in their first attempts."
> Let them actually finish the damn thing first, then let's talk about "getting started" with it
If you'd actually read the linked post you'd see that the framework recently became effectively finished from an API standpoint. Most of the work post-RC is going to be bug fixes and documentation.
Sure, there are still things to improve in Ember and there isn't a 1.0 release yet. But this is similar to how Backbone and Batman.js (which we also tried) had some quirks in their early days.
Despite some of the drawbacks, we are happy with ember and are using it in production for both a web client and mobile app.
Does everything work flawlessly? No. Has it been useful to us and do we like it? Yes, certainly! Should you use it? Maybe, less adventurous people should probably wait until 1.0.
I'm not sure Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton could have put it better.