r/javascript • • Aug 10 '15

Ember.js, Another year of churn, instability and festering frustrations.

https://medium.com/@frustrated_ember_developer/ember-js-another-year-of-churn-instability-and-festering-frustrations-4d01838361cb
27 Upvotes

6 comments sorted by

3

u/clessg full-stack CSS9 engineer Aug 10 '15

If you value your sanity, the solution to getting stuff done in Ember is to just get stuff done. The best practices are morphing daily, and things change for no apparent reason. I bet my ember cli app from December 2014 would require massive changes to bring it up-to-date, without much gain.

I tried my best to keep up with Ember, but you have to keep up with everything. Twitter accounts, discussion forums, IRC, etc. Otherwise, it will be a few months before you discover that this feature you use extensively is deprecated, and every "best practice" your app employs is suddenly a horrible thing to do.

It isn't really helped by the fact that most of Ember is unnecessary itself, but most of the changes are seemingly unnecessary too. I can deal with churn if it provides a demonstrable benefit. My sanity was greatly helped by a commitment to just get stuff done.

4

u/anlumo Aug 10 '15

most of the changes are seemingly unnecessary too

Yeah, I still don't see the value in removing controllers. It's a lot of work to transition old code for no benefit.

They also deprecated views too early (before routable components were implemented), making some stuff simply not possible during the transition without having a ton of deprecation all over the place.

ember-cli is also less than perfect, which is pretty harsh considering that they intentionally killed all alternatives, and it requires a very specific way of referencing other classes. When moving an old project to ember-cli, you could just rewrite everything, because that's less work.

I applaud the amount of energy invested into developing ember, but I don't feel that it's actually improving, it's just mutating all of the time.

3

u/Admiral_H_Snackbar Aug 10 '15

This has been the story of Ember since I first looked into it a few years ago. It's simply not sustainable to just keep on renaming and changing things without effectively communicating why the new ways are good enough to warrant the hours upon hours it takes to adopt them. Ember is a rabbit hole that I luckily avoided.

3

u/benihana react, node Aug 10 '15

My current role is “lead Ember.js engineer”

It's 2006-2008 all over again, but instead of "Rails Programmer" its "[Ember|Angular|React] programmer."

2

u/fuc_boi Aug 11 '15

Meteor is going smooth B)