HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

this is more fun: http://vimeo.com/68215606

⬐ itsbits

this is very old...lot has been changed for better in Ember and some what in Angular as well..

⬐ petercooper

I keep forgetting I did this, lol. I gotta admit, I was surprised Tom came out on top so easily with this - not a man to underestimate! ;-)

⬐ tomdale

If you're gonna step to me, better make sure your framework game is tight.

If you're deciding between Angular and Ember, this video is a entertaining comparison with good examples - http://vimeo.com/68215606

⬐ rapind

More entertaining than informative I'm afraid. Project Lead v.s. Guy Who Uses. I don't mean that as a criticism of Rob, I just don't think it's fair or expected for him to have the depth of knowledge in AngularJS that Tom has with Ember. I'd have done worse.

I know it's a pain to have to evaluate all of these frikin' frameworks all the time just to get moving, but I'd really recommend building a non-trivial app in both ember and angular.

I've been interested in using Ember.js in the frontend for a Rails app, especially after watching a mock competition between it and Angular [1]. But it's beta status kept me from using it, and even now I wonder if it really is production ready, or just API-stable (which they say they will be as per http://semver.org/). I also don't know if it's really worth the up-front cost of learning and slowing down initial development of a new product, especially while at a startup trying to set an aggressive release date for the product.

I'm also a bit worried about the need for everyone on the team to learn how Ember works and its conventions, when they already know how to figure out whatever mess of ad-hoc jQuery and random objects someone would write instead (as bad as that is for maintainability). And finally, I won't have the advantage of green field development, as there is an existing app which will be added to. So there will end up being a chunk of the app with Ember, and a (functionally separate) part of the app not using Ember at all.. Which does not seem ideal.

Anyone want to chime in with their experiences?

[1] https://vimeo.com/68215606 - Note it's a bit unfair with the project lead for Ember, tomdale, on one of the "cage match"

⬐ sandstrom

We've used it in production for quite a while, and it has worked well for us.

We gradually moved our previous jQuery-implemented app onto Ember, so it's certainly possible to do it in stages (we still have a minor section which we haven't moved yet, because it's up for rewrite regardless).

There are still improvements to be made, but we're certainly happy to be using it live.

⬐ gavinjoyce

> I don't know if it's really worth the up-front cost of learning and slowing down initial development of a new product

This is true when considering the introduction of any new technology or when to pay down technical debt. The answer for you will likely depend on the complexity of the product that you are building, how important a great UX is, how close you are to shipping something, and whether the promise of building a clean and scalable browser application outweighs the short term benefits of delivering a "mess of ad-hoc jQuery and random objects".

I've worked within a medium sized team building a large Ember application and have seen first hand how beneficial it can be when dealing with application complexity and a need for precise UX attention to detail, even when using a much earlier version. I've also experienced frustration with the documentation and quickly moving goalposts as the framework evolved towards v1.0.

Happily, everything has become so much easier in the last few months. The documentation and guides are now a fantastic resource after a huge push from the team and community. The framework itself requires much less boilerplate code, Ember automatically generates controllers, routes and views at runtime should you not need to customise their behaviour. The addition of support for promises across the framework has resulted in more terse and consistent application code. I've found the community to be very helpful and I'm excited to see how it will grow over the coming months.

> So there will end up being a chunk of the app with Ember, and a (functionally separate) part of the app not using Ember at all.

I'm helping a client do exactly this at the moment. Their current application consists of a many pages with ball of JavaScript and jQuery sitting on top of their clean REST API. They want to raise the bar for what their application can do and the medium term goal is to deliver a single page Ember application. In the short term, we're building some of the most complex new features in Ember. These features will be accessed through modal iframes for a time allowing us to build out the Ember application without having to rebuild everything.

There was a link posted in the other discussion (by visionscaper) that makes the direct comparisons that you suggested. Personally, that's also what I want to see in these types of blog posts.

Cage Match – Ember.js vs. AngularJS : http://vimeo.com/68215606

I still haven't had to pick one side, but this talk will certainly make me lean towards some framework. I just wish it was a 4-sided battle with Backbone.js and Knockout.js since those are the other 2 frameworks that are on my radar.

⬐ skxc

I've recently started a project with angularjs and that "cage match" was incredibly fun to watch, we need more head-on stuff like this in webdev. :)

⬐ jlampa

OT: What is the name of the editor the Angular guy is using?

⬐ cheapsteak

Looks like JetBrains WebStorm http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/

⬐ gphreak

While the cage match was fun to watch I found it pretty one-sided. Tom Dale has awesome live stage skills and was better prepared.

While Ember and Angular seem to be pretty close in terms of functionality etc, Angular has recently gained a lot of momentum judging by Google Trends, blog posts and available 3rd party libraries (http://ngmodules.org/).

This might not be important for everyone, but when I could just plugin an Angular bootstrap model and stuff worked, I was happy and chose Angular.

I'm currently contemplating if I should use AngularJS or Ember.js for my upcoming project. Although I have experience using Ember, I was kind of put off by it because of a) the fundamental changes they made to the routing system in a very late stadium of the platform’s development (AFAIK it was officially introduced in Ember 1.0 prerelease) and b) Ember can be a mind-bender sometimes when you’re working on a large application (having many views and sub-views).

So, I was looking at AngularJS as a potential alternative. At first glance it seems quite straightforward. Until I saw this:

Cage Match – Ember.js vs. AngularJS : http://vimeo.com/68215606

I know that Tome Dale (Ember.js) and Rob Conery (AngularJS) only demo the respective platforms superficially in this video, but it got me leaning towards Ember again.

To comment on your wish to have “a batteries included framework, which I can use in production”: Ember certainly has a lot of batteries included: it’s a framework that makes opinionated choices how you should build a web app.

⬐ sahrizv

-To comment on your wish to have “a batteries included framework, which I can use in production”: Ember certainly has a lot of batteries included Thanks for considering those factors. Your reply was very helpful.

We are using Ember.js for our upcoming release of billysbilling.com. It's a huge app. We already have 60 different routes and several hundred .js files.

The best thing about Ember that I always tell curious newcomers is that Ember is both easy to make small apps with, but it's also trivial to keep expanding into really big apps. You can keep repeating the same pattern infinitely without rewriting old parts of the app, and without feeling like adding bulk to the app. I see our app as a large very flat structure. We can go in and replace every small piece in isolation to everything else.

My impression of something like Angular.js is that often when you want to add new features you have to go back and refactor a lot of stuff (just check out the cage match between Tom Dale and Rob Connery https://vimeo.com/68215606). It feels like a pyramid that will need a lot of maintenance to stay standing.

This is not the case with Ember. Ember was written by some very smart people, who have spent _a lot_ of time refining how an app should be developed in the long run. Features are prepared for the future. Both the future of browsers and JavaScript but also the future of developers' apps.

I am sure that Ember will prevail over all the other frameworks within the next year and stay on top for many years to come.

⬐ bcardarella

I think Tom does a great job of showing how far Ember has come in the past few months.

⬐ machty

Not the most evenly matched standoff of all time, but Ember wins some serious points in the URL-driven department.