I loved ember for years. Even attended EmberConf in portland around 2015. In fact, I'm just weeks away from retiring my last ember codebase that was in production and worked great for a decade (but I haven't updated in 5 years, since I was unable to keep up with all the changes). But after years of the community dying the most slow and boring of deaths, and having an absolute nightmare needing to hire Ember consultants, I really soured on it.
It is the main reason I completely stick to the boring mainstream (like react) now, so I'm never again stuck between "nobody knows Ember" and "this one consultant is charging $28k a month cuz I'm competing with LinkedIn, Netflix, and Apple" and then am stuck with them implementing engines for fun and then I don't have the time to undo it months later - all left me wanting to flee.
Basically, left it for non-technical reasons, just practical "literally nobody except billion dollar companies use this, I've painted myself into a corner" reasons.
But I do have fond memories of building things with it, personally.
We had the same issue hiring 8 years ago in the UK.
Since then I realized I’ll never require a react/vue/angular/ember/svelte/etc experience, just go for good JavaScript developers with frontend experience, framework doesn’t matter.
Took them a week or two to understand the Ember patterns that’s it.
I think we overcomplicate, all these frameworks are just slightly different ways how to build web apps, the core patterns are the same. Anyone experienced can pick any of these frameworks in matter of days or weeks.
Same on the backend, great if you’ve have experience with any of the express/hapi/koa/nest/fastify/hono, but if you don’t have experience with the one we use, it’s still fine. Hire good engineers, not good “framework” engineers.
Ember is not Backbone or Marionette, both of them are stagnant. Ember’s actively maintained and improved with 6 week release cycles and LTS versions.
Ember on frontend is what Rails is on backend: less fashionable, opinionated, mature, and still useful when you value long-term app consistency over ecosystem hype and new JS framework of the month.
I love that ember is still going. It’s obviously not the number one choice these days, might never have been, but it represents approaches to frontend web dev that are very different from the standard so it’s always great to see the diversity of ideas out there.
I remember my first full time frontend job I applied to in like 2013 the job listing said I should know ember, backbone, and angular. I was kind of living out of my car so I just studied up a bunch on Ember at the time at random Starbucks.
It turns out they didn't use any of those and didn't ask questions about them in the interview. :) After a year or so they did start using Angular though.
Anyway, I did end up playing with ember and backbone around that time. Cool to see it's still developed.
I've been waiting for their Polaris edition for a while now. It looks like it is still not released. But am gonna learn Emberjs one of these days. It will be my secondary framework for projects.
We need more LTS versions of dev tools like emberjs, django, node etc. And am a fan of their RFC process as well. It looks like this is the framework you use if you want to incrementally improve stuff without having to go through radical shifts between versions.
Before backbone there was already knockout.js which was based on signals. Which is what all the hip frameworks are converging on now anyway. You could have bypassed all the drama.
It is the main reason I completely stick to the boring mainstream (like react) now, so I'm never again stuck between "nobody knows Ember" and "this one consultant is charging $28k a month cuz I'm competing with LinkedIn, Netflix, and Apple" and then am stuck with them implementing engines for fun and then I don't have the time to undo it months later - all left me wanting to flee.
Basically, left it for non-technical reasons, just practical "literally nobody except billion dollar companies use this, I've painted myself into a corner" reasons.
But I do have fond memories of building things with it, personally.
Since then I realized I’ll never require a react/vue/angular/ember/svelte/etc experience, just go for good JavaScript developers with frontend experience, framework doesn’t matter.
Took them a week or two to understand the Ember patterns that’s it.
I think we overcomplicate, all these frameworks are just slightly different ways how to build web apps, the core patterns are the same. Anyone experienced can pick any of these frameworks in matter of days or weeks.
Same on the backend, great if you’ve have experience with any of the express/hapi/koa/nest/fastify/hono, but if you don’t have experience with the one we use, it’s still fine. Hire good engineers, not good “framework” engineers.
Ember on frontend is what Rails is on backend: less fashionable, opinionated, mature, and still useful when you value long-term app consistency over ecosystem hype and new JS framework of the month.
It turns out they didn't use any of those and didn't ask questions about them in the interview. :) After a year or so they did start using Angular though.
Anyway, I did end up playing with ember and backbone around that time. Cool to see it's still developed.
We need more LTS versions of dev tools like emberjs, django, node etc. And am a fan of their RFC process as well. It looks like this is the framework you use if you want to incrementally improve stuff without having to go through radical shifts between versions.