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The idea that Ember is made by/for small and medium sized companies is a bit dated. Several Ember and Ember-CLI core contributors have and continue to work at larger companies like LinkedIn and Yahoo.

In particular, LinkedIn has been using Ember (with Ember-CLI) for over a year now and has found a lot of benefits from its adoption. Having a build system and conventions that a community maintains lets us focus on building applications instead of tooling (though we still have our share of internal tools). We also can give back to the community for things which matter more for applications "at scale". LI, for instance, funded a good portion of the FastBoot work and has been a key driver in the Ember Engines effort recently.

All that to say, Ember (and Ember-CLI) can serve the needs of the whole spectrum of company/team sizes. While it still has some issues to sort out for larger applications, to say it isn't being influenced by large companies isn't really accurate any more.

Having worked at LinkedIn in the past, and seeing the state (stagnation) of their products both current and past, that's certainly not a ringing endorsement.

For anyone else curious about Ember Engines, I found the RFC provided a good explantion of the what and why:

https://github.com/tomdale/rfcs/blob/master/active/0000-engi...

> In my opinion most of the Great Javascript Fatigue of 2015-16 was caused by users trying to fill in the blanks left by the React team and producing one solution after another (and quickly abandoning ship as something iteratively better was released).

I agree wholeheartedly with this. And it's also why I love Ember, you get templates, routing, data access all working together with minimal configuration. I love Django and part of the reason why is that it's opinionated, and Ember is the same.

I found Ember was much harder to get started with than React.

More concepts, it's own CLI and build system, outdated docs. (I used it 2 years ago)

2 years ago is decades in the front-end world. If we make decisions today based on the state of things years ago, we'd be screwed.

And yet nothing much changed in the needs of webapps or in the Javascript language in the past two years.

And if we CAN'T "make decisions today based on the state of things years ago", then we're really screwed.

> And yet nothing much changed in the needs of webapps or in the Javascript language in the past two years.

But Ember has likely come a long way in that time - I think this is mcardleliam's point.

For me the creation of ember cli was like admiting their framework didn't work as good as they intended.

I'm sorry, Ember has come a huge way in 2 years. We've got 2.0, which was a big leap forward, a whole bunch of concepts were refined/removed or changed.

Also you're flat out wrong: Ember-cli isn't really anything to do with the framework. You don't need it to write Ember apps, it's just the communities command line tool for managing Ember projects. That's all.

This is only theoretically right.

Practically, there are Ember modules/extensions/features that require Ember-CLI to work or are a huge pain to work with, if you don't use the CLI...

for example animation libraries or glimmer.

> I think the React team needs to take a little more responsibility for the eco-system it created. You can't call it just a view library when most use cases use it to develop entire applications.

This is the reason I've embraced React. No, Facebook doesn't dictate how React fits into the rest of your app, and yes, it requires more effort up front to fit the pieces together. But judging by the popularity of React vs. kitchen-sink frameworks like Ember/React/etc., many developers seem willing to invest this effort.

Another comment here mentions Django; clearly some developers prefer the batteries included approach, but others don't. Is one preference right and the other wrong? Is any developer that doesn't adhere to your preference not taking "responsibility"?

It's a matter of encouraging health in a community. A lack of proper resources(which can be everything from documentation, tutorials, guides, libraries, to tools like Ember-CLI) can lead to mistakes in design and part of your community going off on a tangent, which leads to dead branches of development trees.

For example: While React still works for a lot of people who did things in ways advocated early on, the rise of Redux and functional reactive programming has caused the community to move in a direction many library authors weren't aware of when they began.

Is it anyone's fault? No, not really- but taking advantage of stewardship in a community can lead to better tools and resources that help newbies, take some of the work out of your hands, and keep quality for everyone as high as possible.

Absolutely agree. Innovation also is much easier when not boxed into one approach. It's like people are blaming react for the revolution it created on the client side.

This is a very accurate description of the problem. We’re optimistic though. I’m sure that the community will help make Create React App even better.

Sorry I edited in a WHOLE bunch more that you probably wouldn't agree with after your reply. Apologies!

Lol.

No, I still fully agree.

We think React is a tool to create great UIs, and UIs definitely include concerns like data fetching, etc. So some of this might make it into React in some form in the future.

In the meantime, you can also try out the official Flux library from Facebook (https://github.com/facebook/flux), or Redux (https://github.com/reactjs/redux), which offer great solutions for data manipulation and storage

I think he knows about those two options.

(The guy you're responding to is the creator of Redux) :-)

And now working for Facebook, one of the most active members of the react team at that.

Facebook created React.

Parent did not say Facebook itself is one of the most active members of the React team. They know Facebook created React.

They say that Dan, at Facebook, is one the most active members of the React team.

Who wants to tell him Dan wrote Redux?

Another great thing about ember-cli is that it has very quickly build around it a great community [1]. There are a lot of high quality, well tested addons that are easy to install and use, and it's easy to create your own as well.

[1]: https://emberobserver.com/

The best part about ember-cli is that everyone in the Ember community uses it. No one builds Ember apps without it. The opposite is true of any community/third party React CLI and it's a very powerful difference.

I'd say Webpack plays that role in the React community, just without a blessed and shared way to configure it.

> There's no official path from view layer -> complete app (no guidance for data flow, how to communicate with the server, server side rendering, routing on the client).

Every time I've decided to take an afternoon to poke at React this is where I've given up. I totally understand the model and appreciate how useful it can be but I've never been clear about how to actually hook it up to a backend that isn't just the generated demo scenario and what the requirements for my backend would be.

I think this is common. For me the front page and JSX threw me off. React was so un-opinionated that it can loose its appeal when it presents itself. Once I took an opinionated tutorial it became much clearer to me.

Since then I've used React in conjunction with Django, PHP/Laravel, converted large jQuery codebases to React and created frontend-only sites. I've not yet gone full-on with a NodeJS back-end and isomophic and that's fine for now.

Pass your data into a root component via props. Or use XHR requests to load data from your backend into your root component and manipulate them in your state. Let the data changes in the root component trickle down via props. Keep it simple with React loaded via a <script> tag and work from there.

No, that becomes a nightmare to maintain. Use Redux and connect any component that needs data to the store and get the data needed directly.

Not much more to say about this than that I do not agree, that I think flux-alikes are overused, and that it's just as easy to go too far the other direction, where nothing has any state even for trivial UI state concerns.

Agreed.

It seems like an afternoon is an awfully short time to allot to try a new framework / approach. I have definitely found lots in the Frontend world extremely frustrating at first given there are so many ways to do something, but it eventually clicks and makes sense.

I like React the way it is. It does one thing and does it well.

I suppose that's the price people will pay for needing the latest shiny (React) instead of the now old and boring Ember or AngularJs. And also thinking that the solution that works for Facebook is the one that is the best fit for a small startup, because someday they will reach Facebook's size.

To clarify, I like old and boring because it generates less JavaScript fatigue.

You don't think a legacy AngularJS project is full of "fatigue"? I shudder at the thought. Angular 1 is so awful, even the creator himself, Misko said it really wasn't intended to be used in this way.

I know the cool thing amongst us older folk are to say "Oh there goes them darn ole kids chasing their new toys again" but this is a case where very clearly one is much more suited for the job than the other. There's nothing wrong with a winner emerging. All of the "problems" people gripe about here about React can be avoided. I have posted this before, but I'll post it here again -- You wouldn't go to learn how to program Java by first learning how to configure maven, download dependencies, set up your project in an IDE, and then build and deploy your WAR through Jenkins into a J2EE container for "Hello World"

React has all the goodies provided by the community, but React IS just a library. If you want to learn React -- copy and paste the latest CDN, use the in-browser transformer, and freaking learn react. The tutorials are great, and so is the article "Thinking in react"

In any case, I haven't looked at this CLI, but if it's anything like the ember-cli I am sure it will help with the artificial gripes.

I don't think a legacy AngularJS project is necessarily full of any more fatigue than a React project will be in a few years time.

That's not really fair, though. It will be a React + x + y + z project, because as you said, React is just a library, and it needs other pieces to fill the gaps provided by some of these other frameworks.

I could be wrong, but it will take a couple years to tell. By then, React will be old news also.

Google has similar issues: if you're working on open source software, some tools have to be written twice, for internal and external developers.