My thoughts after Completing my first Ember tutorial

I spent some time with this Vic Ramon's tutorial and learning how to create a basic app with Ember. For those who don't know, Ember is a Front End Javascript framework which is built similar to how Rails is built.

Comparing it to Rails. 

Ember is labeled as an MVC framework, where there is a Model View and Controller to work through each layer while completing the app. It is very possible, just as in Rails, to complete the entire app in one page and 100's of lines of codes, but each file (Model, View, and Controller) holds each part of the functionality. Just like Rails, the Model holds the info, the Controller makes the Model move, and the View is where you see it. There is also a Router just like Rails, and having familiarity to all this made since.

Its hard to compare the two exactly or whether you should learn one over the other, since are both to different things. I liked that the tutorial I completed is used Ember as the Front End of a Rails app. This basically removes the need to put all Front End functionality into the asset pipeline.

I found it very cool how I quickly understood the concept of Ember while going through the tutorial. I always avoided learning a Javascript framework due to my extreme focus on Ruby/Rails and lack Javascript knowledge, but similar to Rails you do not need to know a ton of Javascript to learn Ember, Angular, or any other framework for that matter. The tutorial also gives you some links as you read through and complete the process.

I can tell you that the going through this tutorial was easier than going through any other Rails tutorial, but that is because I had the Rails understanding. Knowing programming in general, plus have a little bit of experience made this extremely easy to get through once I got going.

My impressions

Im very impressed with the Ember community, similar to how the Ruby community impressed me with their openness to newbs. The community is also very small and even the core members seem accessible for questions. I am looking forward to checking out another tutorial, most likely a pure Ember app without Rails, like this one.

What I did like about the Vic tutorial is the ability to switch from Coffescript and Javascript. Rob is probably not going to like this recommendation, but if you are know Rails already and now learning JS, learn Coffeescript. The syntax of Ember reminds of Coffeescript and it makes sense why Vic, recommends it over vanilla JS, however I do know there is a large job market for people who know pure JS, so to each their own. I have never taken a Javascript based course to learn the basic syntax and barely 20% of the way through the Codecademy (I need to finish that), but I am surprised how much of the syntax I understand.

During the tutorial I finally learned how to properly debug JS in the Chrome console (here is a good tutorial on it). I had a couple typos preventing me from moving on with the tutorial, but in total it took me about 6 hours my second time. The first time I went through the Ember tutorial I had a lot of issues with Coffeescript syntax errors and switched over to pure JS, but by then I had a better understanding Ember and was able to fly through it. I plan to finish the Coffeescript version tomorrow and recommend if you do try this tutorial to try both, its good exposure.

If you know Rails and looking to get into a FrontEnd framework, then definitely try out this tutorial.