Everything You Need to Know About Ember.js

Although, there will be modifications and new additions with each version, the basic core concepts remain the same. So, here we go-

Overview about Ember.js

First introduced in December 2011 by Yehuda Katz, Ember is an open-source, productive, JavaScript web framework and is known to be the best choice for ‘ambitious developers’.

In the words by Team Ember, quoted as-

“Ember.js is a productive, battle-tested JavaScript framework for building modern web applications. It includes everything you need to build rich UIs that work on any device.”

Ember follows MVVM (Model-View-Viewmodel) model architecture and is best suited to build complex, large-scale, single or multi-page client-side applications.

Without having been backed by those popular and giant-sized companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, it is plausible of it to catch up with the frameworks like React.js so fast and secure 4th place among the most-popular JavaScript front-end frameworks in 2020.

Though, React and Angular own the front-end development department, Ember is not too far to reach there. It has everything one can ask for building an application and much more.

It embraces new additives without discarding the old features. Mostly like A battery that will never run out of energy despite adding additional load.

Maybe that was a terrible way to put it like that but you got my point, right?

The Ember CLI is another marvel that provides code generators that generate whole new entities and put them in the right place.

It follows two principles, i.e. Convention over Configuration (CoC) and Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY). The first one implies that it is highly opinionated and the second one means that it avoids repeating the software patterns.

There are many other reasons why many developers like to work with Ember-

• Built-in devop environment
• Perfect Routing Solutions
• Convention-over-Configuration Approach
• Fully-featured data access library (Ember Data)
• Faster rebuild
• High-performance and faster rendering (due to Gimmer rendering engine)
• Easy upgrades (in every 6 week cycle)
• Backward compatibility
• Fully-featured modern test runner
• Tight-knit community
• Rich Ember Ecosystem

Basic Flow & Core Concepts of Ember

The basic workflow of Ember is depicted in the image below-

Routers

Each application states, in Ember, is represented by URLs. Once the URLs are set, the Ember router maps them to a specific Route, the Route Handler, which then renders a template and loads a model.

Templates

Templates are how Ember organizes the HTML layout in the application. It uses the syntax of Handlebar templates.

Models

Models are objects defining behavior and properties of application data you want to show the user as per what problem your application is trying to solve. They represent persistent states and persist the information to web servers. Different applications have different models (of course!), as they have different purposes.

Components

Ember components take care of how the UI acts. The components consist of two main parts- a JS component file defining behavior and a Handlebar template defining markup of the user interface.

Hooks

Hooks in Ember are methods that are called automatically without having to call them specifically in the application. For example, whenever a component renders, the willRender() hook automatically gets called.

Add-ons

The addons are third-party plugins that extend the functionalities of Ember. While Ember CLI, obviously, is a great asset and provides an easy way for npm packages, these addons offer flexibility and functionalities way beyond than a conventional npm package might provide.