I stumbled across Ember yesterday and then spent 4-5hrs reading up about it, watching YouTube videos etc and it certainly grabbed my interest. However, I haven’t taken the plunge just yet other than a little tinkering as I had some concerns/queries.

Firstly front and center on this forum is the thread about a few people leaving and equally a few other not surprised by this, which is a little worrying.

Documentation/Tutorials seem to be wildly out of date, primarily I can see and accept this is due to Embers rapid development and API changes but surly there should be some constantly updated docs and walk throughs to go with that?

EmberData took me an age to find and download the js file and even now I’m not sure if I got the right file, information about it is very vague.

Finally, this is the main reason holding me back as the other points above can be worked around, it seems that Ember is on the brink of a new version as well as EmberData and HTMLbars en route. As I have said I’ve had a tinker but before diving in to develop something serious I don’t want to find that I have to go back and recode 60% of it to work with the latest updates when they are released, is that what is going to happen?

One a final note, the CLI, I don’t like using CLI’s, do you HAVE to use it? It seems the examples using the CLI have vastly more folders created than those that have simply added the js and html files to a web root, like the starter kit for example, are you missing out on something if you don’t use the CLI?

Hi.
You’ll probably get better responses from more experienced ember users, since I only started using ember about a month ago, but I’ll try to do my best.

You can use ember without ember cli, but your experience is going to be lacking. for example the ember way for AMD is to use ES6 modules (it is highly recommend not to use requireJS even tho it might be really easy to setup) and your only way to do it currently is by using ember-cli.

if you don’t keen on using the cli (as I am) I would try to check if Angular fits your needs before going with ember.
My main reason to choose ember was its IE8 support and the hope that it will be more efficient at binding data.
which is important if your going to have a UI with a lot of elements in it (like a huge table) unfortunately I found ember to be really slow at rendering large sets of data so the fact that the actual binding is more efficient doesn’t help me much.
(on IE8 the mockup UI I made takes too long to load and IE kills the script)

This will hopefully change with HTMLBars but it doesn’t seem like it will be available any time soon (I couldn’t find any official data when it suppose to be available)

HTMLBars is a drop-in replacement so you will see 2-3x speed improvement without touching anything. Ember Data has a stable API with no breaking changes allowed.

You can definitely build an app without Ember CLI, but I’ll be straight up and say that if you don’t see the need for it, you’re probably relatively new to programming in general. It’s kind of a really bad architectural decision to eschew the use of build tools. It provides a sane conventional architecture, support for preprocessors, minification, code linters, previews, development server, auto-reload, and so on. It also has the least amount of risk because it’s the officially accepted solution, so really, this is no-brainer for anyone building a real-life app.

As others said using CLI will make things easier in that you don’t have to manually manage a lot of the details of exporting a compiled project for use on your server.

However, if you just want to get started and really don’t want to work in a CLI you should check out the starter kit on the ember js home page. The difficulty here is that you will have to manually write out a lot of your template code and make sure everything is properly defined in properly named script tags in your html. The video at the start of the guides on the ember js website does a good job explaining this.

Also, to experiment with bits of ember and get familiar with how it works I recommend trying out

At the end of the day Ember is just javascript. But there are a lot of tools and process to manage that javascript in a more time effective way. That is why ember cli exists.

Also if you use ember cli you will need to be aware that it is using ES6 style modules which is very different from how things work in the starter kit which uses Javascript globals. Same ember js underneath just two different ways of organizing the code.

If you are new to node js, npm and cli tools it can be a little daunting at first. I recommend trying out ember starter kit and the jsbin thing which is like starter kit just pre setup for you. Get your feet wet in how ember itself works and then learn about the CLI build which is a different animal entirely.

Also, not sure where the docs are incomplete or outdated. Ever since 1.0 came out a year ago they have been very careful to make sure there are no breaking API changes. Technically Ember Data is still Beta… But has gotten pretty stable over the last several months. Now is a great time to jump into ember

If you can identify where the documentation and guides seems to be confusing please point it out. The core team is always looking to improve things. And they consider confusing documentation a bug so if you point out issues that helps. Your perspective as a new ember user matters because it reminds us what the sometimes more experienced users of ember take for granted.

Have fun. It will be hard at first but using Ember can be quite rewarding once you get the hang of it. Took me a long time. But I find it a very useful tool.