Ember is one of the many javascript MVC frameworks that have been sprouting up over the past year, and it seems to offer a nice level of abstraction. I was quite interested to see how it might fit for a Rails/MongoDB application we're currently working on, so a few tests were in order.
I hosted some tests on a Rails 3.2.2 base, and threw in a whole bunch of technologies to see how well they play together. The story so far:
- ruby 1.9.3 + rails 3.2.2 with rspec-rails and factory_girl_rails for testing
- haml - templating for a pure rails alternative to compare with the ember app
- mongoid - using MongoDB for server-side persistence, to see how this plays with ember
- inherited_resources - for super thin controllers. Works beautifully with ember and Mongo (I literally wrote just a single line in the server-side controller
- ember.js - the ember distribution...
- ember-rails - makes it easy to add ember to the project (gem installed with bundler)
- CoffeeScript - for the ember scripting
- ember-rest - a simple RESTful resource adapter between ember and rails
- twitter-bootstrap-rails - a gem packaging of twitter bootstrap (adds LESS to the asset pipeline)
Surprisingly, this all hangs together without too much fuss! You can see & fork the demo at rails-ember-mongo-bootstrap-demo.
What's next?
- Testing: I've got RSpec in the project for conventional testing, but I haven't investigated the best ways to test the ember app itself yet.
- Relations: perhaps switching to ember-data to test some non-trivial model associations
- ember-bootstrap: adds bootstrap components to ember. Sounds promising but my initial attempts to use it weren't too successful
Blogarhythm: Remember - Jimi Hendrix
