

The new emberjs.com - tomdale
http://emberjs.com

======
jashkenas
Beautiful site -- lovely to see open source design in action.

It's fun to look at this new site in the context of the progression in the
various iterations of the SproutCore saga over the years:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20081003190606/http://www.sproutc...](http://web.archive.org/web/20081003190606/http://www.sproutcore.com/)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110211051741/http://www.sproutc...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110211051741/http://www.sproutcore.com/)

<http://sproutcore.com/>

<http://emberjs.com/>

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mcrittenden
I'm sad that the on-site docs are still inferior compared to the in-code
comment docs. For example, the on-site docs hardly mention the built-in state
manager, but they're very thoroughly documented in the code [1]. Many people
(myself included) people will usually resort to searching Google before
looking in the code when trying to figure out how to do something.

Ember team, any insight as to what's being done to rectify this, or why this
is?

[1]
[https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/blob/master/packages/emb...](https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/blob/master/packages/ember-
states/lib/state_manager.js#L5)

~~~
trek
Anything doc'ed in code is also available on the documentation subdomain:
[http://docs.emberjs.com/#doc=Ember.StateManager&src=fals...](http://docs.emberjs.com/#doc=Ember.StateManager&src=false)

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superasn
Can someone describe emberjs in one line?

(Their description of a _framework for making ambitious web apps_ is a bit
vague imho and i don't want to spend 15 mins reading docs about something that
may not be of any use to me at all.)

~~~
chc
It's an MVC framework in the vein of Backbone that provides baked-in support
for data binding.

~~~
ollieglass
Could you say what differentiates it from Backbone?

~~~
rbxbx
It has a "Railsier" "Convention over Configuration" type ethos. Certainly more
opinionated, if nothing else, where as Backbone is more of an empty canvas &
instruments to cover it.

There are technical difference as well, but I think that's less of an issue.

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trustfundbaby
The documentation is underwhelming, from a get-up-and-running POV ... protip
for authors of new libraries etc. I should be able to cut and paste your code
and have it just work right away.

If you don't add

var MyApp = Em.Application.create();

to the examples in the docs page the code simply won't work.

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jessep
It's a bit odd that the main example on the home page references an object
called DS on 8 of 10 lines, but DS is never referenced elsewhere in the
documentation.

I know from prior exploration at their github account that DS stands for "data
store" but I still think it's pretty weird that searching for "DS" on the docs
page brings up nothing.

~~~
te_chris
I've used ember for a little bit. DS is the root namespace of ember-data
(<https://github.com/emberjs/data>), which if you look at the github is pretty
clearly still in Alpha and not recommended for production use. I've asked on
IRC but haven't been able to get a straight answer out of anyone as to whether
ember-data is ready for mass usage or not...

edit: kept trying on IRC and got an answer. Basically Tom Dale said that if
you're using rails and ember you should be using ember-data now - should also
be using Active Model Serializers gem too.

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citizenparker
Woo! I was at first a bit disappointed to see only two guides - good thing I
checked out the docs.

Hopefully now the docs around EmberJS can stabilize and really take off.

~~~
rxcfc
More guides are in progress.

~~~
johne20
Thanks for the guides, I especially like the comparison to Rails. One tiny
note, I noticed a few spelling errors briefly browsing through. "recieve" and
"appropirate" on <http://emberjs.com/guides/ember_mvc/>

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mkoryak
On a more personal note, it would be great if someone could compare this with
meteor.js (which recently got featured on HN)? I mean a brief comparison would
be really great..without having to dig up the docs in detail..

~~~
Jare
Meteor covers the client and the server, and tries to hide the different roles
they play and how they communicate with each other. Ember is purely a client-
side MVC framework, server's up to you (besides some conventions).

~~~
mkoryak
Wow, thanks a ton! Exactly what I wanted..

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neya
On a more personal note, it would be great if someone could compare this with
spine.js (which recently got featured on HN)? I mean a brief comparison would
be really great..without having to dig up the docs in detail..

~~~
taude
Ember is probably more comparable to something like AngularJS (But I don't now
100% because I've never used Ember, just looked at their site for a few
minutes). Backbone and Spine are much lighter-weight infrastructure
frameworks.

~~~
Osiris
Ember is a much more complicated than spine.js. I recently did work with
Backbone.js and Ember.js and reviewed the documentation for Spine.js. Ember
has a lot of magic that's really awesome, but it can be difficult to learn how
to work within the framework properly.

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snitko
What makes me sad about js client-side frameworks and Ember.js in particular
is that they are still only client-side. Nevermind the code duplication, but
the bare fact that I have to actually think about how to construct my server
so that it works with Ember.js. The reason why people hooked up on Rails so
quickly is because it solved all of their problems, not just one. Novices are
not going to try Ember.js just because it works on the client, while having no
idea about the server-side.

~~~
jeffbcross
There are some nice new tools emerging to solve this problem, but don't force
front end devs into an entirely new platform. One of my projects is an open
source server (<https://github.com/deployd/deployd>) that's totally un-
opinionated on the front end, but makes it really easy to add robust backends
to client apps.

~~~
snitko
What I'm saying is that a tool for webdev that wants to stand any chance of
becoming popular must be able say to developers: here's the familiar MVC
structure, you write your models, you create your views (hopefully out of set
of widgets that are highly replaceable/customizable at any moment), we take
care of talking to the server, saving your models to the storage and syncing
between different instances of an app. Sure, there are problems to solve here,
but since everybody does it their own way at the moment, I don't see no reason
why we can't have a framework that solves them for you.

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pacomerh
Comparing it to Backbone, feels to me that Ember uses a notation that is
closer to what I already know about Javascript, for example all the object
methods and prototype class emulation. I was going through the API and
everything seemed like it made sense right away. The only thing I wish the
site had is more examples with bi-directional bindings.

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daenz
This _seems_ cool, but as someone who has never seen emberjs before, the "js"
part of the "getting started with emberjs is easy" was not very clear.

It's clearly some model/controller logic, but what is ArrayController? And how
is the view chosen?

Just some feedback from fresh eyes

~~~
throwa
A quick and dirty getting started tutorial can be seen here:
[http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/flame-on-a-
beginn...](http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/flame-on-a-beginners-
guide-to-emberjs.html)

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alexlande
Looks nice, but it's pretty difficult to read that typeface on that dotted
background, especially on Windows. Better on a Mac, but still not great.

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covati
We just started playing with this, it seems like a great alternative to
backbone for those who want a bit more of the common stuff done for you (esp
data binding).

Backbone is a great starting point if you have strong opinions and want to own
it from the ground up.

Just my $0.01

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andypants
It would be nice to have an explanation of what the 'Starter Kit' contains and
what it's for.

~~~
mmahemoff
I wasn't expecting a download link for the Starter Kit.

These days, I think it's easier to point beginners to a CDN and a JSFiddle
than require any download.

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Qworg
On Chrome in Windows 7, the smallest text under your initial images is
dropping bars.

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cheap
NOW designers will use it...

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erichocean
Is the 42k min+gzip all in? Or are jQuery and Handlebars still separate
downloads?

The example on the front page shows code from ember-data. Is that a separate,
additional download too?

~~~
Osiris
Ember uses a built-in customized version of Handlebars, so there's no extra
download for that. However, jQuery is a separate download.

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VeejayRampay
Bravo. Congratulations to you all on a great piece of open software

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benwen
Ember makes me think of longer burning coals at the end of a bbq. Maybe better
to call it "Lighter Fluid"?

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danso
How mature are the ember community's various supporting libraries and
boilerplate builds? This kind of bothered me:

<http://emberjs.com/documentation/#toc_getting-started> >> __If your needs are
simple or you're interested in just playing around, you can download the
Ember.js Starter Kit. The Starter Kit is based on HTML5 Boilerplate and does
not require any build tools or other dependencies...For larger apps, you may
want to consider using Ruby on Rails. Rails helps you manage your source code
and other assets, while also providing the REST API that your application will
talk to. __

(not saying that backbone et. al have better boilerplate builders. Just that
hopefully there's a medium ground between HTML5 templates and RoR, the latter
which I hope to mostly avoid through the use of JS frameworks)

~~~
gkop
Yea, I would _not_ recommend using Rails for this purpose. Middleman
(<http://middlemanapp.com>) is the best parts of Rails asset packaging in a
more lightweight package.

<https://github.com/emberjs/website> is developed with Middleman so may serve
as a good model.

This leverages Middleman as well: <https://github.com/wbinnssmith/ember-
frontend-boilerplate> .

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gringomorcego
Click API -> Click Docs -> At home page?

