Hacker News Reader

Comment by _____s | Hacker News Reader

With Glimmer as a standalone library, I think ember's going in the right direction. There's been some excellent work on Fastboot and Engines in the last year or so and I really like the approach ember's team is taking with this.

React, for me, still offers better composability. You deal in plain JS objects, pass them around, and can build really complex UIs on top of that. I also really like redux. I still use ember heavily though; I think we'll get there as well!

View on HN

I think Ember is really good at marketing the stuff they work on, but it is usually overhyped.

Fastboot, for example, was announced what, 3 years ago? The readme says it's still not ready to use:

> The bottom line is that you should not (yet) expect to install this add-on in your production app and have FastBoot work.

https://github.com/ember-fastboot/ember-cli-fastboot

I find this is often true of Ember projects (like Glimmer 1), a lot of hype for something that has a lot of rough edges.

At the end of the day, the Ember team takes a lot of time to not just build things the right way, but also make it as painless as possible for teams to upgrade along the blessed path. This has been a learning process to understand how much more time that takes, and has caused some past announcements to feel like they weren't delivered on, when in fact they simply just took more time to get right.

Yep, the 90-90 rule[1]

The other lesson to take is to be more cautious about announcing stuff before its really ready. But they don't seem to have learned that here. Here we have a project with its own logo, a marketing video with a nice electronica beat behind it, and a YouTube Live announcement...

... For something they are telling you to install from their master branch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

Yes, I had the same feeling.

While the Ember devs talked about stuff like Fastboot and Glimmer, while other frameworks just had all this out of the box.

Their whole approach seems to be rather concept heavy and back in the days (2014/2015) the docs where horribly outdated and you had to check stackoverflow for basic things.

I had to use Ember 2 years on a project and found it clunky, but okay. I switched to React 2 years ago. And after I met a few hardcore Ember devs from back in the days, who said they switched to Angular2 or React I think this was the right decision. It's nice that the existing projects get so good support, but I wouldn't recommend anyone to start something new with Ember :\

One of the things with a large framework is that moving to a completely new direction is more challenging than it looks. So, at times, ember has made unrealistic promises — and Yehuda alluded to this in the keynote — but one can learn from it and get better.

As for Fastboot, it has its edges but there are people using it in production (DockYard is one, if I'm not wrong). ember-engines also says it's experimental and it does have some missing stuff (from my experience) but what is there works well.

Some of the things perhaps needed a rewrite of the underlying architecture. One great thing about ember (apart from v 1.13) has been just how painless it has been to upgrade. All the major changes they have made have largely been drop-in. Getting to that kind of backward compatibility is also a pretty impressive feat considering how big it is.

So, all in all, I agree that some of the things were overhyped and unrealistic but it seems they have learned from it, and I think that's just fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com