Comment by anonyfox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonyfox | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So true. Ember is the antidote right now for the frontend land.

- MVC (Backbone's big thing) - Two way binding (Angular's big thing) - Components (React's big thing) - SSR like the others now (FastBoot) - High performance with the Glimmer Engine (should beat react in theory) - Books. - dedicated package repository (emberaddons) - actually community driven - stable + mature (+ seamless upgrade paths) - and many more advantages

plus, as you said, the ember-cli tool, that gets you up to speed fast. The tooling makes the final success, just have a look at go... the language appears fairly weak/trivial, but the tooling is excellent.

I could freak out everytime I have to set up an react project, weighing everyones opinions about every little package for every usecase, IMO react shifts the complexity from the UI to the tooling. Ember is just perfect and the only real option I could recommend right now, and I'm just sick of thousands of "me too!" approaches for everything, this extreme diversification cripples actual progress to a halt.

After working on a few large JS applications (using Backbone or Angular or React), I decided to try out Ember for a relatively smaller application.

Ember feels very Rails-y (likely on purpose) and the documentation wasn't great. It took me a few hours to get a surface level understanding of how things worked with each other, especially Ember Data. I ultimately ended up dropping it because of my frustration. It was only a couple months ago (early December 2015).

Obviously I'm just one data point but I know I've talked to other devs who feel the same way. I'm sure Ember will only get better but I don't think it's the antidote at all.

Maybe not worth much, but the one Ember app I use routinely (that I'm aware of) is YNAB. The startup is slow, the payload obscenely large (over 3MB) for basically 2 different views, a handful of modals. It has odd UI issues occasionally that appear related to data-binding of some sort (tabbing through a field will sometimes cause an associated modal to freak out). Plus the URLs are useless.

I don't know how much of that is Ember and how much is implementation, but I assume their developers are smart enough.

What value did Ember bring to the party? It seems to have made what appears to be a simple thing (at a high level; not that there isn't plenty of effort involved in little bells and whistles here and there), complex and slow.

For me it's like that old saying about Art. I may not know exactly what I'm seeing, but I know what I like, and that isn't it. When your framework has basically the goals as ASP.NET v1 but the code looks worse, that's a major step in the wrong direction. It's been over a decade. This doesn't feel like progress.

Last time I had to use ember (about 2 months ago), the ember-cli tool had major performance issues. I remember rebuilds after a single line of code was changed taking almost 10 seconds. It also generated almost 10 gigabytes of temporary files over time. Plus I remember an issue with import paths not matching real filesystem paths, which was messing with my IDE (and my brain until I figured out what was going on).

It's a good tool when it works properly, but they really need to work on those rough edges a bit.

> I remember rebuilds after a single line of code was changed taking almost 10 seconds.

Do you happen to be on Windows? My Ubuntu laptop compiles changes to our pretty large app in under a second, but on Windows it does take up to 10 seconds.

Yes, it was a Windows machine. I did all the "make it faster" steps, like running the recommended script that adjusts Windows Defender and search indexing configuration, but in the end it was still very slow, even on a fairly fast SSD.

There are several teams at MS using ember (and ember-cli), and they've been PR'ing improvements. (Source: MS hosted the last Seattle Ember Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/Ember-js-Seattle-Meetup/events/2278796...)

What helped me the most was moving to Node 4+, which made memory management MUCH better.

I feel the same. I love Ember, it's the first proper frontend framework and boy is it frustrating at the start. Once you get past that though it's plain sailing and takes my productivity to a whole new league.

It's just not mentioned... anywhere. It's not hip like React or has a big sponsor like Angular I guess. But I don't get it, it's really really good.

> Ember is the antidote right now for the frontend land

Sounds familiar: http://brewhouse.io/blog/2015/05/13/emberjs-an-antidote-to-y...

Yep. Ember is the best solution out there at the moment. There is a trend, that silently more and more serious dev team switching to Ember. Ember never had hype period. It works and it is really matured. With Ember you can focus to your product and you don't worry any more about tools. I think most of the Ember dev is just smiling when they see these debates, because for us everything work and we ship day by day with a very high level of developer happiness. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com