After Ruby on Rails and React.js it is finally time to talk about Ember in 2019, its state in the new year and a couple of reasons why to use Ember in 2019 or as the next technology to learn.
1. Powerful add-ons
The size of Ember’s package ecosystem is well-developed, so you can be certain you will find the right ones that will help solve your problems. The framework even has a dedicated website, where the packages are grouped by categories, including ratings for individual ones and the specific documentation. You can also make use of normal npm packages by including them in your components.
You can create your own addon easily by running ‘Ember addon name’.
2. Convention over configuration
Although this notion is widely linked to Ruby on Rails, Ember also makes use of it. Those well-defined best practices are built within the framework, together with a tool for updating them. Some argue that this limits freedom and developer’s autonomy, but what cannot be argued with is the fact that in 9/10 cases, Ember is making a good choice for boosting your productivity and building speed.
3. Ember CLI
Ember’s ‘Command Line Interface for ambitious web applications’ allows you to interact with the computer’s operating system. It gives you a project structure with amazing add-ons and Brocolli.js build pipeline, ensuring live reloads and quick rebuilds.
This is the main tool for code generation, running tests inside the browser, live recompilations. Most of the popular frameworks use a CLI tool similar to Ember’s, which goes to show how amazing it is.
Thanks to Ember CLI we can generate an entire application almost instantly with just one command: ember-new with and what is more, we can determine the functions the application will possess.
4. Stability without stagnation
With the release of Ember 2.0 a notion of stability without stagnation was introduced. This simply means that although continuous progress development is the ultimate goal, it is important not to leave anyone behind. Therefore, Ember is backward-compatible, which means updates will not cause applications running older versions of the framework to break. the process of upgrading goes smoothly and the user is well-informed about the upcoming changes with deprecation warnings.
What is more, Ember is planning to start releasing a new, stable version every 6 weeks.
5. Community
The community is the one point that is mentioned in case of many popular frameworks, Ember.js is no exception. With almost 800 contributors on Github and over 22,000 questions on Stackoverflow we can be sure that a problem we encounter or a feature that is necessary for our project was previously addressed by someone. The conversations happening within the community are open to the public and fully transparent. What is more, the library has extensive, versioned documentation, there are even channels on Slack (DISCORD) dedicated to Ember.
The community of Ember-lovers frequently holds various meetups and conferences in over 66 countries (find one near you here), the most popular being EmberFest in Europe and EmberConf in the USA.
6. The future of modern Ember - Ember Octane
The team standing behind Ember in 2019 dedicated themselves to releasing a new edition of Ember every year. Each of those releases will be focused on a particular theme - this year’s being Ember Octane, which will be related to productivity and performance. The official website says that Ember Octane is about ‘doing more with less’, which means Ember will be easier to learn and the framework itself will become faster and smaller. Ember Octane will introduce native JavaScript classes, treeshaking, incremental rendering and rehydration and much more.
Summary
Taking everything into consideration, Ember.js is doing great and 2019 will bring even more amazing stuff to the picture. The above-mentioned advantages are just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to advantages of using the framework, but if you are still on the fence, feel free to get in touch, the community will definitely convince you to join us on this amazing adventure as an Ember developer.
We have also created a downloadable Ember testing guide that will help you improve your work and provide best practices.
