I am writing this little post because the "A Call for Blog Posts" in Ember's blog. I must say that english is not my native language, but I am doing my best to express clearly my ideas here.
Now, I knew about Ember in late 2013 when everyone was hyped about "the best framework for web apps". We were working in something ambitious, so starting with Ember 1.7, we were building things.
I am not a web developer, my main skills are in backend but I have been using Ember for many versions and many years, however my experience with other Ember competitors was zero before this year. We decided to use react for a new project, and it was interesting how at the start everything went fine, but when it was growing there were some issues that implied the change some architectural designs we chose at start.
The obvious feeling was "in Ember this does not happen" (this does happen, but it is usually less problematic because clear conventions). In summary, this took us like 2 months + 1 month to achieve real productivity in the project... even, I am sure that any update in the future could be difficult if you compare it with Ember updates... so even if anyone is hyped with new libs, the fatigue of building each time a little world with dozen of libs, each one claiming the use of good practices, is something that makes Ember a better choice to not lose time.
Actually, people are doing more experiments with react/vue/etc, that with Ember. The amount of interest for Ember in last years has been low if we compare with their competitors. At this moment it is not a problem, but as in any demographic analysis, this will be bad for the future.
So here I want to expose some ideas that will help to catch some interest from devs that tasted the "bitter honey" of expend 1 month exploring 10 libs for each feature in their software:
- Endorse the best plugins: Here I am thinking in plugins like ember-concurrency, ember-can or ember-browserify. There is not any hint in docs that show how amazing things exist in ember community that are a "killer feature". Many new people will consider ember if they knew about them!
- ember-data the good the ugly: Looking in our react project, management of data is a real pain that ember-data helps to control in a cool way, however, it is not "perfect" for newcomers. If you are using ember-data, you must shape your backend API to it. I really like how the ember-data store takes care of syncing the local data with the backend, but I dislike the lack of flexibility in communication with the backend. I think that looking in GraphQL will give us a better approach in this matter, making ember-data more friendly for newcomers.
- Realtime, websockets as a goal: It is 2018, but realtime is not something ember is promoting. Idk, ambitious web apps sooner or later must use websockets, I feel this as something that will attract many new users too.
What is the bad thing with Ember?: In my little experience teaching Ember to new devs, there are some things that bother them when they are learning ember, in particular about the strange and not clear difference between JS objects and Ember objects.
By example, this does not seem obvious when you show in an {{#each ...}} the response from a store.findAll() directly, vs when you save it in an array and then show the array.
Or the use of this.get('something') instead this.something, fortunately last ember versions do care about this (which is a great deal!, Ember should buzz more about this).
Ember is not a MVC framework anymore, It is a component framework now, but many people out of the community still thinking in Ember as MVC, changing this general idea is very important too.
Also, looking in how ember competitors are showing their advantage vs ember, I think that ember should do the same!, show to newcomers why they want to use ember instead vue or react is very important... because even if the competitors are looking simple, there come more complex when an app becomes bigger.
I really love this framework and it is my hope to see more people using Ember in the near future.
Thanks for your time reading this!
I strongly aggree with everything you said!
In my #emberjs2018 post I elaborate your first point
https://medium.com/@chilicoder/emphasize-the-role-of-ember-addons-more-fcc4cfb1440b