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Comment by dzonga | Hacker News Reader

seems they're using Ember.js . Reason I love spotify so much is that it's available on the web, no need to be downloading native apps everywhere. Always bet on the web. also good to see, another web property using Ember. As a react dev, competition is healthy

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That’s not surprising. Ember was forked from SproutCore which was designed to mimic the Cocoa API.

Ember’s model/view binding and event model still closely resembles Cocoa’s, as far as I know.

Um, I thought Ember was SproutCore 2.0, so isn't this more of a rename rather than a fork?

Not exactly. Ember was originally “SproutCore 2.0” but the project goals diverged and a fork occurred (it was renamed “Amber” around that time, before a name clash was discovered and it acquired its current name “Ember”). Development on both continues concurrently today.

Incidentally, the latest major SproutCore version is 2.0.

Apparently even the Apple Music in iTunes tab was written in ember as well: https://twitter.com/geoffreyd/status/616848868391555072?s=21 (from 2015)

IIRC, the old Mac App Store was in ember too

I love React, but when I saw Tom Dale demo GlimmerVM, I thought to myself, now HERE is something truly new and exciting(in that context - there's nothing new about bytecode). I watch the progress with great enthusiasm.

I’m surprised. I haven’t heard anything about Ember in years. Not since 2013 or so.

I guess it is still a liked tool, I also read about Riot Games using it for the redone client of League of Legends.

https://technology.riotgames.com/news/architecture-league-cl...

Is it really that surprising given React is FB and Angular is Google?

> React is FB and Angular is Google

This doesn't matter in practice - they could have freely used either to design the web client at no cost. If they wanted to take over development and go their own direction they just had to fork them.

Of course in doesn’t matter in practice. It’s the optics.

Is there still patent uncertainty around React (or Angular)? Otherwise, Im not sure why anyone outside HN would care about the optics of which front-end library was used.

Are you really saying you don’t understand why Apple might not want to use a framework created by their frenemies in Facebook and Google, especially given Apple’s focus on privacy and willingness to make an example of FB and Google for their comparatively lax privacy standards?

Sure, but how does any of that resonate with the general public? "Apple is using Facebook's front-end code library" isnt exactly a gripping headline or tweet. You can read the source code to either; its not as if theyre secretly embedding tracking into every React/Angular app.

Ok. I mean you can ask that to Tim Cook :) If not optics it’s about ego. Again, if Apple hates FB/Goog then why use their frameworks when there’s dozens of other alternatives.

Apple’s iCloud has alternately used Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. That’s a bit more trusting than a front end web framework.

https://betanews.com/2018/02/26/apple-icloud-now-powered-by-...

Not that it matters but I interviewed for an Apple team that was using react. Something adjacent to iTunes if I remember correctly.

FWIW, Apple uses both for other projects.

I think every team at Apple uses what makes more sense for the project. The official SwiftUI docs and tutorials use Vue.js for example: https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui/creating-and-c...

alive and well with huge strides in the framework, better than ever. that said ember gets much less press than it's peers, partly due to not being backed by a major fang corp and historical perception.

https://blog.emberjs.com/2019/08/15/octane-release-plan.html

I only remember Ember because it was so much more popular at the time (2013? Early 2014?) than Backbone, which I had just completed an application using, and Angular, which was relatively new to the scene. Ember looked like it was the next big thing. And then, I guess, React came around and everybody was hot on the heels of the next big thing.

Well, I tried Ember back in the day for one project and remember it being pretty hard to learn and quite fat in terms of file size. It was quite powerful when you were using it the way it was supposed to be used, but made your life pretty hard when you wanted to do things a bit simpler and the initial load times were horrible at the time.

I heard, that things got a lot better over the years, but I never tried it again. However, I still admire the very clear architecture they had with ember-data as it was very useful (e.g. for testing) and eliminated a lot of uncertainty regarding the API design.

It's super easy to pick up for a weekend project, and the Discord community is active enough to find support when you have questions.

Going strong since 2011, although Ember is aimed a lot more toward quiet business productivity.

What some see as constraints, others see as consistency. It's more typically seen in "dashboard apps" but it's also great when you need to quickly spin up a new site and don't want to have to configure anything. I know movie studios in LA that use it for those kinds of promo websites, because of the fast turn around time.

Another thing that is cool about Ember is the community-driven process- if you have a good idea for Ember and the energy to make it happen, it typically will happen. Makes you feel like you can make a difference if that's your thing.

Does any one know if they are still using Ruby Rails for Apple Music's backend?

For https://tools.applemusic.com/ yes. Not sure about https://beta.music.apple.com/

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