
EmberConf 2017: State of the Union - chadhietala1
https://emberjs.com/blog/2017/04/05/emberconf-2017-state-of-the-union.html
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mwpmaybe
A great read that recaps the history of Ember, what helped it stand out from
the crowd in the past, and what worked and what didn't, segueing into the
introduction of Glimmer.js, a standalone UI component library extracted from
Ember 2.10. Congrats to Tom, Yehuda, Godfrey, and the rest of the Ember Core
Team! Looking forward to another productive year.

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0xADADA
I was playing with glimmer.js, it feels like you can now "NPM your way to a
full app" similar to the react eco system (if you're into that sorta thing).

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Sancty
Our company's main application is built on top of ember 1.13. We've pushed off
doing the upgrade and are leaning towards a move to react (all our mobile apps
are done in RN). This might be a solution.

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mwpmaybe
Upgrading from 1.13 to 2.x isn't terribly challenging. (1.12 to 1.13 was much
worse.) What's holding you back?

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Sancty
Just now seeing this. Honestly it's just a big project and everything else in
our solution has moved on to react. Upgrading would be far less work for sure
but it's still an investment.

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lurker789
I hope they start making TypeScript a first class citizen in Ember, just as
they have done with Glimmer, it really makes development so much easier,
hopefully with .get() and .set() going away it will make it easier for the
typescript compiler to figure out what is mutating what.

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mixonic
There was a lightning talk on TypeScript at EmberConf that also gave a status
update on how TS and Ember work together:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCHFjGSCqP4&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCHFjGSCqP4&feature=youtu.be&t=6h34m26s)

It looks like full support could be landing soon. I know TS 2.2 added flexible
enough class modeling to handle Ember's object system:
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/2017/02/22/annou...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/2017/02/22/announcing-
typescript-2-2/)

Of course we're attacking that from the other side as well, and experimenting
with native ES classes in Glimmer.

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lurker789
<3 mixonic, thanks for the reply, I was scouring the repo / blog for any word
on typescript support, this looks promising.

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orf
Yes! Ember is a really awesome framework, when coming from the likes of Django
where there is a blessed version of everything you need (like a router, file
layout, template language etc) it's really nice for those to all be included.

This post hits the nail on the head with Embers problems though, and it does
seem like it's been left behind a bit in terms of using the latest and
greatest tools. For example migration to Babel 6 from Babel 5 is only just
finishing for the core components. get() and set() are also not so nice for
newcomers.

As the post highlights this is mostly due to the projects age and baggage
Ember carries. I see this as a positive though, Ember is pretty damn mature
and well thought out, even if it's lacking in some syntactical sugar (and
sometimes the latest and greatest in JS libraries/tools is such a fast moving
target that it's just not possible to track it).

The future is looking bright for Ember! Well done!

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jsnk
Glimmer looks awesome! Is it easy switch out handlebars for some other
templating language?

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mmun
The typical strategy is to design a language that compiles to Handlebars, e.g.
[http://emblemjs.com/](http://emblemjs.com/).

It would be possible to support other languages more directly but they will
tend to have a Handlebarsy flavor.

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echelon
Write in a language that compiles to another language that itself compiles to
markup...

The web frontend world is crazy to a backend engineer. We have hard problems
to solve too, but ours usually arise from well-understood problems, such as
CAP theorem.

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always_good
It's somewhat jarring when people use "we" as if they're in a faction and
they're the spokesperson of that faction. It's almost as bad as using "you
guys" when faced with a single commenter.

Anyways, you can't think of a single analogue for the emblem->handlebars
example?

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echelon
It's because my colleagues generally consider the frontend landscape to be the
Wild West.

The only analog I can think of is statically typed SQL, which is in fact
awesome.

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ddoolin
Props for the Eminem reference. I didn't see that coming AT ALL and I laughed
for a good couple minutes.

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tabeth
GlimmerJS is going to be amazing. I can't wait to check it out soon.

