So I’ve started working on a project with Ember. It’s one page of an internal web application that needs to be usable quickly, and with key shortcuts. The backend is JSON fed from a Rails application, with fairly sane, RESTful routes.
What on earth is the state of the Ember.js framework? The documentation and guides available on the Internet are for at least 3 or 4 different iterations of the code. Some of the guides on the official site don’t even work for the current stable release – they require cloning master from GitHub. I’m currently using master, because it has features in it that I need (sane routing), but there’s hardly any documentation on it besides what I can compile using the included Rake tasks.
Specifically, I’m trying to build a paginated list of items that responds to hash URLs (example: localhost:3000/stuff#/pages/20), and I’ve had an absolute hell of a time trying to get things to work the way people seem to be saying they should. This isn’t so much a cry for help with my specific problem as it is a “what the hell is even going on?”
Secondary question: does it make me a n00b if I’m too cranky to just read the code and figure it all out?
Don’t know if your question is quite precise enough to stay here, but regardless, I’ll share my 4 – 5 months of experience using ember. I hope this helps.
I think the ember-team and contributors are working hard to ship the 1.0 as soon as possible, with up to date documentation. With the 1.0 release I think we will have a stable enough version to work with.
At work we decided to follow the master branch, and we often update our code base against master. The drawback is that the effort required to keep our software working on every update is quite large and could be tedious (fortunately we have a good integration test suite that helps to prevent major regressions).
It has also some advantages:
Personnally, during last four years, I was only a java developer. When my company choose to switch to web-based apps rather than desktop apps (a year ago) we searched for a good JS library to use. At the beginning, for me coming from Java world (MVC with swing), I was lost. I had the feeling of not doing development, but only makeshift job. Where was my MVC ??? All was mixed in crappy js files… and here comes ember. Finally, although all is not easy with ember, although I have less than 6 month of javascript experience, I feel comfortable now developing some features in our software, and (perhaps the more important thing) with the feeling (also the convinction) of building a well designed app (OO, separate model/views stuff). Without ember I’m quite sure I would be unable to do this.
To answer to your secondary question, I think it does not make you a noob if you don’t want to read the code, but today I think if you want to be more confortable with ember, this is the better way.
I would be interrested if folks reading this can edit and fix my English (some editing applied)