Comment by wycats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wycats | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree that our getting started story could be much better. In fact, it's our primary focus as we move towards 1.0.

Specifically:

* We're actively working on a Getting Started Guide with live examples that walks the user through building a new application from scratch.

* We're continuing to improve our guides to talk through areas that might be confusing for new developers, like the naming conventions[1] we use in Ember

* Ember 1.0 will feature the return of the Starter Kit[2], which directly addresses the concerns by the OP. We removed it temporarily to bring it up to date with the most recent idioms, but it will be coming back very soon[2]. This was a hard decision that sucked, but leaving around an out of date starter kit seemed worse than removing it.

I take this concern very seriously, and hope that people will continue to give us a look as we improve the experience for new users.

[1] http://emberjs.com/guides/concepts/naming-conventions/ [2] https://github.com/emberjs/starter-kit

One thing I'm a big fan of is when projects have an always updated always working "Hello World" sample included with their project. This is something I've found to be common with iOS libraries and I think it would be helpful for you guys.

It's nice to be able to take a look at something that works and is simple enough to read through in one glance and go "Ah hah!"

If only Apple did the same for OSX, its getting better, but theres still tons of examples that dont compile w/o several warnings, and usually haven't been converted to ARC.

This is the response that should have been made on OP's original thread in the first place (and I do see you've xposted it there now).

Totally agree. The OP posted at 4:05 a.m., when I was very much asleep. I've been a little bit less responsive this week in general as I've been participating in TAG[1] this week. I'm very sorry that our project came across as uncaring.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/

Should anyone doubt it, wycats & the ember team certainly do care a great deal about their users. The Ember team and Backbone team have differing philosophies about client side development, but wycats, tomdale and the rest of the crew are smart guys trying to do the right thing.

At this point I'm familiar with Ember, but not Backbone. How do their philosophies differ?

If you guys are interested in putting together some usable examples (in the spirit of docs.angularjs.org), I would love to help you integrate live examples with Plunker (http://plnkr.co/edit/).

Bootstrapping an editor session is as simple as POST'ing a simple form targeted at that url.

I would really love to see the Ember.js community get some use out of Plunker. (@filearts on twitter if you'd like to chat).

Does Plunker have an about page? I've been looking for a description of what it does and what it's for but can't seem to find anything.

That sounds like a very good (if not necessary) idea.

You can see a list of features on the development version of the site at: http://beta.plnkr.co/ These include:

* Real-time code collaboration

* Fully-featured, customizable syntax editor

* Live previewing of code changes

* As-you-type code linting

* Transparent translation of intermediate languages like Coffee-Script, Typescript, Sass, etc (with sourcemapping included where available). This means you create 'app.coffee' and ask for 'app.js' in your html and you are served the compiled version of 'app.coffee' as well as its sourcemap.

* Forking, commenting (not done yet) and sharing of Plunks

* Fully open-source on Github under the MIT license

Also, there is both a Google Group (http://plnkr.co/discuss) and github repo (https://github.com/filearts/plunker).

That being said, neither of these properly address your question. I will push out an about page as soon as I can.

It would be really great if there was a well documented example application similar to Discourse's topic list, that had a: a search term populate (populate not filter) the topic list and the ability sort the topics by clicking on the column headers.

I would build it myself, but I personally haven't been able to become proficient enough with Ember (in the admittedly limited amount of time I have tried mastering it) to do so.

I'm very excited to see this naming conventions guide come out. I think you've done a great job here of clearing up in one place a lot of the magic that Ember does for you. Understanding how Ember looks things up is critical to developing nontrivial applications, so thanks!

Another thing that would really help Ember's popularity are screencasts, something like egghead.io, where you'd show off some more advanced stuff. I know that they'd probably be a lot of work to make and to keep up to date, but they are pretty invaluable for getting users up to speed. And the time spent doing these is an investment, you guys would spend less time answering questions and you'd probably have more committers which also saves time (maybe).

Edit: Now that I think about it, aren't DHH's Rails screencasts considered one of the reasons why Rails got as popular as it did?

There are a few Ember screencasts: https://peepcode.com/products/emberjs http://railscasts.com/episodes/408-ember-part-1 http://railscasts.com/episodes/410-ember-part-2

Unfortunately, both cost money at the moment but I've heard they're worth it.

Thanks, I'm aware of those. Nevertheless, three paid screencasts by third parties aimed mostly at beginners are not the same as a long-term effort made by the Ember team to make these videos and keep them up to date. IIRC, the Rails team was putting out like a video every month or so. This might be one of the things that made people aware of Rails since even non-Rails devs were aware of these videos and eventually, some of them were tempted to check out what the commotion was all about and eventually switched. If you show people how much one can do with Ember in say 10 minutes, more people will be interested in the framework.

Edit: Now that I'm rereading my post, it sounds really entitled and arrogant when it was not supposed to. It's more like "if I were on the Ember team, here's what I'd try to do".

Agreed, more screencasts would be wonderful. Unfortunately, we haven't had time for this yet. It's something we'd love to do if/when time permits.

What's needed, and I'm sure it's just a matter of time, is an embercasts.com in the style of railscasts.com. I think Ryan's way too busy to double his workload, so the opportunity is there for someone else to take up this banner.

Certainly iTunes U drove a lot of interest in iOS dev.

it would be great if you could help out more in irc. the noobs are asking pretty fundamental questions and not getting much help. i think it would help shape your guidelines as well to know about some of the problems on the front lines.

> getting started story

Try talking like a human or at least a developer and not a marketroid.

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