Ember is your new friend when it comes to client side web application development. At the time writing this article ember was at RC2. We at bitcrowd have a strong background in Rails, so this post will list valuable resources (blogposts, videos, screencasts, …) to get you on the track with ember backed by a JSON-Rails-Backend.
I’ll update and extend this article regularly. Let’s go!
The basics
http://emberjs.com - the starting point of it all
http://emberjs.com/guides – the official ember guides – evolved a lot after feature freeze for RC
https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js – the code
Ember & Rails
As easy as it can be. ember-rails does all the work for you. It ships with ember, ember data and handlebars. Thanks to bundler and asset pipeline you are just 3 minutes away from “Hello World”.
The templating language
Ember is tightly connected to handlebars. Its syntax is kind of similar to html.erb. – Templates at rails. We prefer to use haml. You too? Have a look at Emblem.js.
Persistence – connect ember and rails
Ember itself does not ship with a persistence layer. Ember Data is your weapon of choice (included in ember-rails). BUT: it’s still in alpha and massive work in progress. Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz gave an update about the data component a few days ago.
Of course you can write your own persistence layer – have a look at this blog post how to user ember without ember data. But I’m sure – as soon as ember 1.0 is released there will be more time for ember data and it’ll be the well-working standard persistence component.
Watch and relax
The neat blog app in thirty minutes
Fire up Ember.js
Recordings of Ember Camp
Railscasts Ember part 1
Railscasts Ember part 2
Learn from the darlings
Travis CI ember web client
Discourse
TodoMVC
Conceptual stuff
A great interview with Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale about Ember and its concepts and motivations.
