Ember.js – is it a Correct Choice for your Business?

Growing Popularity

These days the Single-Page Application (SPA) approach for building cloud applications keeps gaining popularity over the traditional server-side solutions we are familiar with. An SPA allows web applications to look like a regular desktop program, with almost instantaneous loading of pages and providing fantastic user experience. However, this approach immediately adds complexity to the software development creating the need for libraries and frameworks to help facilitate it. One such framework is Ember.js.  

SproutCore 2.0 became Ember.js. The project was authored by former Apple employee Tom Dale and a member of the Ruby on Rails core team – Yehuda Katz.  The project combined Apple’s best practice application architecture and the developer-friendly ergonomics of Ruby on Rails framework.

Along with Angular and React, Ember.js is one of the technologies we have a solid expertise in, resulting from years of experience helping several of our clients build scalable SaaS solutions. In 2017 Angular and Ember.js became two main JavaScript frameworks for building Single Page Applications. (React.js is often considered a framework, however, in actuality it is just a library for building user interfaces.)

What’s good?

We would recommend Ember.js for those clients who are interested in three driving concerns:

• if the technology choice is going to be an asset or a library to their feature roadmap;
• if it will be difficult to support and extend the app after being delivered;
• if they can hire for technology

Ember.js adopts the “convention over configuration.” approach that Ruby on Rails discovered. Developers do not waste time thinking about configuration decisions, and  spend more time thinking about the product roadmap. Ember.js focuses on app-specific Code and consists of libraries and APIs that set rules for how developers should write code, check and test it, and deploy their application. As a result it provides a first-class command line tool in ember-cli and it takes care of the build tooling, compression, asset fingerprinting, minimization, and a host of other minor stuff.

Ember.js’s all-in-one architecture enables product roadmaps and teams to focus on app-specific code and defer configuration details to the framework. Designed with developer ergonomics in mind, its friendly API helps teams get the job done – fast, which means you can build more features in less time for less money.

For these reasons companies like Amazon, Apple, Condé Nast, Heroku (Salesforce), Kickstarter, LinkedIn, MassMutual, McGraw-Hill Education, Microsoft, Netflix, Sony, Square, TED, Yahoo and others have greatly influenced and  contributed to the development of Ember.js.

What’s Tricky?

In the beginning Ember.js can appear to be a difficult framework to work with because  it does a lot in “default” that is not explicit or familiar based on experience with similar libraries. Ember.js comes with a fairly steep learning curve that can slow down a project until you learn all of the tricks. Once you fully understand it, Ember.js is really a simple but robust framework that does a lot of things for you, thus reducing the code and time development. Overall it is well worth the time it takes to learn.

Bottom Line

We would highly recommend Ember.js for projects that have a relatively long period of development. It is easier for our clients to support, extend, and upgrade using this technology because it was developed while taking into account standards such as W3C and ECMAScript TC39 (the standard body for the language). This means  that the framework integrates well with the HTML and JavaScript APIs it is based on and provides a degree of future-proofing, since other frameworks are less invested in web standards.

The Ember.js community has been doing a great job of  incorporating new ideas into the framework for the last 6 years and that makes Ember.js a great long-term project moving forward.

To learn more, contact the professionals at Swan Software Solutions today. Our experts are prepared to discuss what software development, including Ember.js, can do for your business.