
Ember: Baby Steps - jchannon
http://wekeroad.com/2013/03/20/ember-baby-steps
======
bsimpson
I met Tom at I/O last year and have been following Ember ever since. It's
striking to me how consistently the message among newcomers is "this is
hard/confusing".

I considered evangelizing it at my then-employer when it was still called
SproutCore, but remember thinking "if it's going to take me at least a day or
two before I begin to understand, how long is it going to take the rest of my
team?"

There are a lot of interesting ideas in Ember. I'd love to see it take off.
Hopefully we'll start to see documentation that makes it approachable for a
wider audience of web developers.

~~~
robconery
One of the things that I really wish we could discuss as "a collegial group of
developers" is whether this is the "Best Effort" or not.

Honestly, as it stands, I don't know if I'd ever try and explain Ember to
anyone aside from the basics which I've done.

The concepts are interesting - as you say - but in practice it just feels like
a mediation on "what can we leverage with clever naming" that results in code
that is ... less than clear in intent and purpose.

The API is the thing (to me) that brings it down. Nothing is discoverable and
it's not easy to jump from one context to the next. In Angular, for instance,
it's a pretty simple jump to understand that if you want an ability/function,
you'll need to inject it.

This leads you to understand that "I need to do a JSON call... hmmm" and then
boom: $http.

Ember isn't this way. It isn't until you grapple with models that you
understand you'll be writing jQuery code to get remote data. In my mind this
is a huge gap, given Backbone's ability to do it straight away, and Angular's
injectable $resource stuff.

I like the ideas, but the API needs to be rebuilt.

~~~
supporting
Right on. At a certain point, you 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?

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110530004346/http://blog.sprout...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110530004346/http://blog.sproutcore.com/announcing-
sproutcore-2-0/)

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 futzing around with an
over-marketed research project?

Let them actually finish the project first, then let's talk about "getting
started" with it.

------
ebryn
I'm really glad Rob stuck with it and is starting to grok Ember. I promise
it's worth it!

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sideproject
Very good introduction to Emberjs. I'm one of many frustrated beginners of
Emberjs and dug through MANY MANY tutorials, screencasts, guides, etc etc and
compared to most of them, this tutorial is good. I look forward to more of it
and more advanced level of tutorials.

------
1qaz2wsx3edc
Here is the same (more or less) in angularjs: <http://tinker.io/4b0d7/1>

I left out routing as these are baby steps. This example aims to be simple and
clear.

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regularfry
Well, this all sounds remarkably familiar:
[https://github.com/regularfry/website/blob/master/source/gui...](https://github.com/regularfry/website/blob/master/source/guides/getting-
started/your-first-ember-app.md) <https://github.com/emberjs/website/pull/316>

~~~
robconery
I hadn't seen this. If you're implying that I took your coe without
attribution, I can guarantee you that didn't happen. I've been scouring the
web trying to find examples and the only one I _did_ find was Tom Dale's.
Which I morphed.

I like what you've done after having followed the link here, but it kind of
wanders into discussions about IE and UTF8, and then actions and
interactivity.

I was trying to show the core of what Ember is and does. Hopefully you can see
that our goals were slightly different?

~~~
regularfry
> If you're implying that I took your coe without attribution

Not at all - more an expression of frustration that we've all duplicated
effort.

You're right, you do go in a different direction, but the groundwork to get an
absolute beginner up and running isn't something I think should need to be
replicated over and over again...

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edman
I've tried with Ember.js couple of times and really wanted it to work, but I
gave up each time. I don't see how they hope to get more users with this kind
of documentation. Documentation and community are crucial for success and
adoption of open source software.

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gbadman
As mentioned in the other Ember.js thread, you can easily play with a hello
world app here: <http://beta.plnkr.co/edit/gist:5206526?p=preview>

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nachteilig
I've wanted to like Ember ever since it was SproutCore, but man--it's hard to
get into it.

That said, writing like this might push us in the right direction.

------
dmourati
Worked for this total noob.

