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Comment by ef4 | Hacker News Reader

> When talking routes, urls, and resources - that's a RESTful consideration and involves stateless state "stuff" (sidestepping the REST debate here). What is this concept doing in a desktop app?.

Ember is explicitly not about "desktop apps". That's actually why Ember broke off from Sproutcore. Ember is very opinionatedly focused on building web applications that are native to the web and stick to web conventions.

The best web applications still behave like the web is supposed to behave: they have shareable, bookmarkable URLs that allow the application's state to be recreated. This is a big reason Ember's router is different than the other examples you mentioned -- in Ember the router automatically handles a lot more of the state reconstruction stuff.

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The team has been rather clear that Ember is Desktop MVC, not web/server based: https://twitter.com/trek/status/309315009291378690

They say as much in their guides as well.

> The team has been rather clear that Ember is Desktop MVC, not web/server based

That's orthogonal to what I'm talking about. I agree that their use of the term "MVC" is much closer to the original meaning it had on the desktop (like in Cocoa) than the meaning in server-side frameworks like Rails.

But I'm not talking about what MVC means. I'm talking about what kind of applications Ember is intended to be used to build.

A flagship example would be Discourse, which is very deeply web-focused, and nothing like the way you would structure a desktop application.

Your assertion is that "Ember is not about desktop apps". Yes, it is entirely about Desktop apps in terms of structure and approach.

These apps are built on the web. One look at the Discourse Ember code and I think you'll understand perfectly the confusion I'm writing about.

But I'm curious: do you use Ember or are your responses "what you think"

Yes, Edward Faulkner has used Ember heavily and was one of the original contributors back when we started the project.

I'd definitely say that Ember is more Desktop MVC than MVC2. True to it's Sproutcore/Cocoa roots, you are supposed to be able to wire up a lot of the application with the built-in controllers that don't have to be customized (or at least customized very little). Ember is trying to take that approach, make it more familiar to web developers, and add in some additional parts that are part of what makes the internet work (ie, routers for managing state/bookmarkable urls).

> MVC2.

While we're being pedantic, it's Model 2, not MVC2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_2

Silly me. :P

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