ryanwold.net - Civic Tech, Bitcoin, and Open Government Innovation

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I had the opportunity to use Ember on a project for most of 2015. The learning curve, moving from Rails 3.x & 4.x to Ember.js, was quite steep for me.  Retrospecting, it was largely the common vocabulary between the frameworks that reference different concepts and data-flows.

Routes in Rails are similar, but different from Ember's Router and Routes.
Rails Controllers are short-lived, but Ember's Controllers persist through an application's loaded lifecycle.
Rails Models are duplicated for the most part on the client-side with Ember's models. Ember's Models can manage conventional has_many relationships easily, as well as client-side validation.
Rails Views and Ember Views are different.  Rails views are rendered as html in the browser, in the same way that Ember's Templates are. In Ember, a `View` is a javascript file that contains (javascript) behaviors for a Template.

Ember has come a long way in the last 18 months or so. From 1.2ish to 2.x. Ember-cli has become the defacto way of building Ember apps; providing conventions for common patterns.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/emberjs">@Emberjs</a> + <a href="https://twitter.com/Firebase">@Firebase</a> feels magical</p>&mdash; Ryan Wold (@randw) <a href="https://twitter.com/randw/status/679381777891254272">December 22, 2015</a></blockquote>
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After getting it up and running again in my local Sandbox, I took a stab at getting Ember-cli running with Firebase as an independent codebase. Within 10 minutes, I created this [Ember Prototyping](https://github.com/afomi/emberfire-prototyping) repository, created from `ember-cli` with `emberfire` installed.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">3 small commits to get up and running with <a href="https://twitter.com/emberjs">@Emberjs</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/Firebase">@Firebase</a> - <a href="https://t.co/48nAX2fRob">https://t.co/48nAX2fRob</a></p>&mdash; Ryan Wold (@randw) <a href="https://twitter.com/randw/status/679530295914147840">December 23, 2015</a></blockquote>
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My hypothesis is that having a flexible, persistent data-store will be helpful for developing javascript-heavy apps, because a significant portion of javascript apps are developed in the browser development tools. Not having to coordinate restful services as an intermediary, out-of-browser code snippet becomes a win.

### References

* https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-03-13-ember-cli-in-9-minutes.html

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