Posts Tagged ‘ember’

Ember.js

Monday, March 16th, 2015 | Programming

emberjs Ember.js is a JavaScript framework for creating “ambitious web applications” apparently. What that translates to is a JavaScript framework that allows you to get started quickly and have URL-based apps.

It is under heavy active development at time of writing so means that there is plenty of new stuff but also means that the documentation can quickly get out-of-date, so it might take a bit of time fiddling around to get it bootstrapped up and up-and-running. There is a helpful Chrome plugin that fits into the Developer Tools too, though most of the time I spend time looking at the standard console.

Once you are ready to go, things are easy to build. It uses Handlebars, or at least a Handlebars style syntax, so if you have used Handlebars, or even Mustache before then you will probably have a basic idea of what you are doing. You can then layer up pages within each other to build complex applications that can all be bookmarked.

It is designed to work out-of-the-box with Ember Data, which provides instant support for a REST API. If you do not have a REST API, Ember.js claims it is easy to adapt to something else, though I’m sceptical that it is as easy as they claim. It seems to work best if you build the app, and then create a standard REST API to work with it.

I have implemented some simple embedded Ember.js apps for my photo gallery as well as working with it for some more complex projects elsewhere. It is a fun framework to work with, but the documentation is a little parse and it is not quite as flexible as I would like. See the Ember.js website for more information.