Question

I have a pure REST rails backend and I’m working on the client side using Ember.JS I understand that ember-data is used for REST communications but I see it’s not even in production does anyone know when it will be ready?

Or if there is a better solution that can be used?

Answer 1

To be fair, Ember.js itself hasn’t actually reached a stable 1.0 version yet. From personal experience, I’ve only ever used the ember-latest.js because their tagged versions are usually so far behind the latest version, and there are too many things missing for me in their 1.0 pre tag. Even the API documentation on emberjs.com is for ember-latest.js, and the 1.0 pre API docs have been archived.

With that being said, as long as you are willing to dig through the new API documentation which is now quite nice, writing in Ember has been a fairly stable and consistent experience for me all summer. Ember Data has also been pretty good, but you have to look into the source code for most of the documentation.

Ember Data has by far the best REST adapter for Ember that I know of, especially because it is built specifically for rails. Look into Active Model Serializers. It almost makes building your API in rails a trivial task. It works perfectly fine for hasOne, hasMany and belongsTo once you understand the conventions explained in the readme for Ember Data. Many-to-many relationships should probably be decomposed into two hasMany relationships with a model in between.

In terms of when it will be ready, they intend to merge ember-data into Ember.js before the final 1.0 release. (source) They have both been stable enough for me though, and quite a number of companies who have already deployed ember apps. Backbone.js is at 0.9.2 and tons of people have put their trust in that, even though backbone doesn’t really have something like ember-data.