17 ms·

"Getting started with Ember.Js is easy." - No it isn't

391 points by floydpink 14y ago

trolley 14y ago
Trek doesn't like this guy's tone, therefore he "can't" respond?
- nsxwolf 14y ago
  The guy didn't sound "uncivil" to me, he just sounded frustrated. If what he reported is accurate, the frustration seems totally understandable.
  - Filligree 14y ago
    It's definitely understandable. I spent about two weeks forcing my way to a functional Ember application, because the framework seemed to have promise. In the process I needed to bother the developers on IRC, read a nontrivial fraction of the Ember JS code, and implement missing Ember functionality from scratch (KVO-compliant dictionaries). Ember doesn't work unless you get everything right, and doesn't provide much in the way of diagnostics, so it was one of the harshest learning curves I've ever run into. They really need to work on their tutorials. It works really well now, though. :X
  - arkitaip 14y ago
    He was sarcastic but that's hardly being uncivil. Thing is, his complaint is probably very representative of many beginners so giving the impression that you're ignoring it can have a very negative impact on a project like Ember.js.
- niggler 14y ago
  (FTR: I think his reaction was deplorable) By din of its presence on the front page of HN he has to say something, but doesn't actually want to engage in what probably would become a massive ember-bashing thread by others who were frustrated with ember, so he acknowledged receipt without giving a formal response.
  - patejam 14y ago
    It's quite simple and sufficient to say something along the lines of "You are right, we are working on this. In the mean time check out some example code here...".
    - niggler 14y ago
      (I fully agree with you and I think the guy's comment was really poor) "You are right" admits that it is not currently easy, and I don't think he wanted to say that outright.
      - moron4hire 14y ago
        There is nothing wrong with admitting you were wrong or admitting someone else was right. It shows maturity.
- rquantz 14y ago
  Apparently when you need help you're supposed to wait a few hours to cool down before you actually post your question.
  - maligree 14y ago
    Not sure how serious you are, but I hate what you just said. It's like.. YOUR software made me frustrated, don't tell me to just wait it off. The reason I'm talking to you like this is YOUR code. And sure, when it's just raving, that may be right, but the guy genuinely TRIED and went through hoop after hoop.
    - jvzr 14y ago
      He was being sarcastic. I'm pretty sure you both agree to the same point.
      - maligree 14y ago
        Fist bump* then. * - or any other commonly accepted ritual interpretable as "we cool, we cool". The cooler the better.
        rquantz 14y ago
        Hmm, I wasn't exactly thinking of it as sarcasm when I wrote it, more pointing out what trek seemed to be expecting, which seemed unreasonable to me. But I guess doing that amounts to the same thing as sarcasm. Fist bump* in return.
        jvzr 14y ago
        I heart the love in that thread, guys!
- Kiro 14y ago
  trek just convinced me not to use Ember.
- bvdbijl 14y ago
  That reaction is incredibly smug
- sdogruyol 14y ago
  he's way too "can't" actually more like cba to respond.
- _ak 14y ago
  Because, you know, ad hominem claims of lack of civility will always get you around the issue of having to face and talk about the pain points in your software.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
patejam 14y ago
Not a very good way to handle potential users. It is quite the turn off while deciding between different JS frameworks to have someone representing the codebase refusing to respond to a user's troubles.
mootothemax 14y ago
This is pretty much why I didn't end up using Ember in a new project. After getting the same errors and figuring out the same solutions, I figured I had better things to do with my time. It's a real shame, but just like developing web apps, you need to make sure users have a good first experience, otherwise they'll run away.
- charlietran 14y ago
  Did you find a suitable alternative to Ember?
  - mootothemax 14y ago
    Did you find a suitable alternative to Ember? I went with Amber in the end. I can't remember if it was more or less painful initially, but at that point I had spite in my fingers. Not sure if there's also a lesson in that for startups: will you get lucky with some users just because they've had a bad experience immediately prior to checking you out?
    - mark_l_watson 14y ago
      Please talk a bit more about Amber. Easy to work with back end REST services? Easy to deploy?
      - mootothemax 14y ago
        Please talk a bit more about Amber. Easy to work with back end REST services? Easy to deploy? I used it to build a very basic Jabber/XMPP client in a little over a day, integrating with an existing system. That's the only project I've used it in so far, and I'm still very much a beginner user. All I can say is that it solved a problem with the minimum of fuss and inside quite a strict time budget, so I'm very happy with it.
  - TranceMan 14y ago
    Check out http://angularjs.org http://angularjs.org ;) Plenty of very good introduction videos on youtube
VMG 14y ago
The all caps headline is a little too much for my taste.
- andrewingram 14y ago
  I suspect he just copied and pasted the text from the homepage.
- DanWaterworth 14y ago
  ... says the one with the all caps user name. It's not quite the same, I know. I saw your comment and had to respond.
  - VMG 14y ago
    I'd change it to lowercase if I knew how
- VMG 14y ago
  Thanks to whoever changed it
- joshrotenberg 14y ago
  Apparently someone likes the all caps version: http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/36418027.jpg http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/36418027.jpg
Hovertruck 14y ago
This was my experience when I tried to use Ember as well. Very frustrating.
mhinze 14y ago
I'm so numb to this kind of pain...
gosukiwi 14y ago
With all the time and frustration needed to learn Ember just do it with Backbone
- modarts 14y ago
  This was pretty much my pathway to developing my current app on Backbone. I think Backbone hits the sweet spot in terms of abstraction needed to structure an application in a maintainable way (and plays pretty nicely with require.js, which buys you a much better ability to break your app apart)
__herson__ 14y ago
Well, programming is not always easy. I felt that kind of frustation when I tried for the first time almost every library/programming language that I'd worked with, either with java, backbone, coldfusion, rails... Trying and researching things is always part of the process, we can't run away from that.
- mootothemax 14y ago
  Trying and researching things is always part of the process, we can't run away from that. You're right: there will always be a learning curve, whatever is being learnt. I think the problem with Ember is that it makes the opposite claims, and fails to deliver, only because the documentation is lacking.
  - __herson__ 14y ago
    Yes, I meant that when I start to learn thing like java and rails, everybody said that these product were easier than "x", but I didn't find them that way.
- glanch 14y ago
  Just because it's always been that way doesn't mean it has to be. If I'm running Ember, today I'm seeing this post and my takeaway is "we need to create a fool-proof quickstart hello world tutorial and make it readily visible to first-timers ASAP", not "this guy is a dick, let's ignore him".
- trolley 14y ago
  > Well, programming is not always easy. Nobody is saying that it is. OP's title was directly in response to the ember.js homepage (where it says "GETTING STARTED WITH EMBER.JS IS EASY."). S/he encountered some (pretty understandable) frustration and pointed out a few major shortfalls in ember's documentation, before asking for assistance; that's not at all running away from "the process". Waving away legitimate (non-trolling) complaints in a dismissive way is pretty condescending, and not at all helpful to the main issue.
- mikeash 14y ago
kaolinite 14y ago
Agree with this - I was planning to use Ember on a new project but quickly fell through holes in the documentation and had to give up and return to plain Backbone.
nkozyra 14y ago
Well the "it's easy" is the selling point, no? I suppose the "ease" of using it depends on one's aptitude. 8-)
nkozyra 14y ago
As an addendum, I tried Ember out and found it to be fairly easy. Is it plug and play, so to speak? No. Will it work in about 5 minutes, assuming you're well-versed in client- and server-side Javascript? It should. "Easy" in this case means for the intended audience. Turning on a computer is "easy," but not if you tasked someone who'd just traveled from 1800 to do it.
joshstrange 14y ago
Trek is making a huge mistake IMHO. As a developer I can think of nothing more helpful than to get a "steam-of-consciousness" excerpt from our users. This is something no analytics package can tell you, if you want to make your "product" easy to use then this is the exact feedback you need. Delverworld was outlining the various pitfalls of getting started with ember.js and a core contributor shrugs it off because he didn't like the guys attitude? No one likes having their shortcomings pointed out but it would have made much more sense for Trek to admit that getting started could be made easier and that the Ember.js team would look into ways to make it easier. Ignoring the issue like he is "above it" is pretty fucking pretentious if you ask me.
- mootothemax 14y ago
  No one likes having their shortcomings pointed out but it would have made much more sense for Trek to admit that getting started could be made easier and that the Ember.js team would look into ways to make it easier Agreed. I recently had a new user point out in quite spectacularly a direct fashion how unfriendly the "Getting Started" section of one of my apps is. It made painful reading, but I would happily pay for users to get in touch like that.
  - joshstrange 14y ago
    Same here, I used to be much more of a "hot-head" when it came to things like this (I'm still not perfect, far from it) but I try not to take things as personally, at the end of the day if it makes my product better then I should shut up and be happy.
- vanderZwan 14y ago
  I'm studying interaction design in Sweden at the moment. This is exactly the point they're drilling into our arrogant heads: you're not a genius, listen to your users. And then you actually have to convince your clients that they are not geniuses, that being an expert can also make you blind to things, and that they need to listen to their users. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design
retube 14y ago
Hmm. I wonder what this emberjs is? I'll just click the home page link and find out. Oh. That just gives me the discussion board, which i'm already on. A bit more looking, a bit more hovering, and.... there isn't one. Close tab.
- bhauer 14y ago
  This seems like a variant of PBSALTPH, a silly initialism I coined when I found myself ranting about product blogs that don't link to product home pages [1]. Generally speaking, any subdomain or isolated "region" of a product web site should always provide a prominent link back to the product's home page. A good option is to use the product's logo as that link. Using the logo to link to anything other than the product home page is a crime against the gods of user experience. [1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pbsaltph http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pbsaltph
  - joshstrange 14y ago
    Could not agree more, there was a post on HN about this recently[1] and I also found this[2] one when searching for the first. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5267330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5267330 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034972
pkorzeniewski 14y ago
I'm always put off by the "look what can be done in just several lines!" code examples on frameworks front pages, they don't represent anything about the framework and usually the simpler the example, the more complex the framework is because everything is "magic" - try to do something differently and you end up hacking the framework internals.
- moe 14y ago
  It's especially offending when, as in this case, the bragging code-snippet omits half of the code that is needed to actually run the demo. Ember is far from the only project guilty of this. If you want to brag to me then make sure I can copy/paste your example to a file and it will run. I'll take a honest 50-liner over a dysfunct 10-liner any day.
delambo 14y ago
Trek must have been a perl monk, back in the day.
_ak 14y ago
> The tone of this topic is not in line with the civil level of discourse I'd like to maintain here, so I cannot respond. This sounds like the euphemistic version of "I don't like your attitude, so fuck off." Not exactly the answer I would want to get as a new user who is stumbling over terrible and inconsistent documentation and error messages.
- milkshakes 14y ago
  At least it's consistent with his "documentation czar" title. Definitely sounds like a Czar to me.
- rxcfc 14y ago
  I agree that Trek's response here is not very helpful. However he has spent countless hours working on Ember's documentation and the fact that it's where it is now is due to his dedication. There's clearly more work to be done and we're all very well aware of that. We've been working on a getting started tutorial but it's been slow going since all of us on the Core Team are very busy with our day jobs. We hope to get something out for everyone as soon as possible.
  - joshstrange 14y ago
    That may very well be true but it doesn't change the fact that his response was very negative (much more so than the OP's) and for no good reason. The OP did not say "Trek sucks, his attempt at documentation is laughable" in fact I would venture a guess that the OP had no idea who Trek was prior to his posting. This was not an attack against Trek or the work he has done but rather a frustrated programmer explaining his predicament and asking for help and Trek told him he wasn't worth his time. If that's not pouring gas on the fire I don't know what is. If I were the OP I would completely abandoned trying to learn Ember.js after a comment like that, talk about kicking a man when he is already down.
- almost 14y ago
  Yes, that immediately turns me off the project. This is great feedback and not at all rude, I wish I could get feedback like this for my projects!
patrickaljord 14y ago
Had a similar experience, then tried AngularJS. Couldn't be happier :) http://angularjs.org http://angularjs.org
- tlarkworthy 14y ago
  same
- tixocloud 14y ago
  Same here - well documented although a lot of technical stuff involved but the fact that they use git for tutorials is nice. Loved playing around and being able to revert my changes back to the original state.
- thiderman 14y ago
  Exactly the same here. I really wanted to like Ember, since I liked the documentation and read a bit about how the project started and how it works on a higher level. However, since I couldn't get through the Get Started tutorial, I gave up and went into angular instead, and I haven't looked back. I'd like to give Ember a second chance, if only so I could be the only person on the internet that has tried both angular and Ember on a deeper level, but right now I'm not sure I'd do any better should I actually try again.
  - senoroink 14y ago
    I reviewed both angular and ember for integration with a rails app for my job recently: https://github.com/et/ember_vs_angular https://github.com/et/ember_vs_angular To my dismay, we went with angular. In retrospect, after playing with the framework, I'm fairly pleased with the choice.
- LandoCalrissian 14y ago
  Angular is really great, just used it on a project for work. Didn't take long to pick up at all and I had things humming along in a few ours. Their documentation is pretty nice and there are a ton of great tutorials.
- 14y ago
neya 14y ago
In my personal opinion, I'd like to present a fair comparison with another similar framework called KnockoutJS. I challenge anyone on Hackernews to show me better documentation than this one: http://learn.knockoutjs.com http://learn.knockoutjs.com Notice how things are explained so well as if they were explained to a child, this is how you should document, IMO. Also, RP Neimeyer, the creator (EDIT: Committer) of this framework, has dedicated a significant portion of his life to helping out new comers to the framework, by having a separate website (http://knockmeout.net http://knockmeout.net) (apart from the one above) to train and help people understand KnockoutJS. This is the kind of effort every developer should put in, IMO, if they want people to get off the ground with their framework.
- hmottestad 14y ago
  I didn't like it. Too much visual overhead. I didn't know where to look. Also a few things went wrong (don't know what). I was clicking around in code window when the tutorial guide on the left disappeared, then I tried refreshing and everything went blank. So I clicked on url in the navbar and pressed enter. Now the page loaded. But everything was blank inside the boxes. OSX 10.8.3 with chrome. Ohh, I found out what went wrong. I tried scrolling in the code window and the browser went back to the last page which it thinks is: http://learn.knockoutjs.com/ http://learn.knockoutjs.com/ and that makes the tutorial disappear.
- tixocloud 14y ago
  Agreed - customer service at its finest and no doubt something we should all aspire to if we want to increase adoption.
- quarterto 14y ago
  RP Niemeyer did not create Knockout. That was Steve Sanderson. Niemeyer has make but 9 commits to the Knockout codebase¹. Knockout's tutorials are great. However, the rest of the documentation takes the form of other, slightly less helpful tutorials. The only API documentation is reading the code. ¹ https://github.com/SteveSanderson/knockout/commits?author=rniemeyer https://github.com/SteveSanderson/knockout/commits?author=rn...
scottcanoni 14y ago
Bad move Trek.
clebio 14y ago
This is all spot on. And despite the somewhat humorous, but not at all rude tone, this guy did some real leg-work to type this up. Documenting something in that much detail takes a lot of time (he went so far as to find the missing dependencies, and copied in the error messages at each step). Duck-debugging often works because you have to get specific, and logging issues is the same. I've had this same experience with Node.js (http://nodejs.org/ http://nodejs.org/), whose homepage links to API Docs (not at all introductory or even linear). Granted, they don't say 'easy', but good documentation is still nice to have. Compare to Django documentation, which is expansive. And I understand that these various frameworks are for seasoned developers who don't need HTML closing tags explained to them. But there are so many platforms and tools out there, and they so often take you from 'toy' to 'enterprise-scale' in this sparsely documented way.
- slantyyz 14y ago
  >> this guy did some real leg-work to type this up This is important to note. The guy obviously wants to use Ember. To me that's a signal that if you help the guy out or address his complaints, that he might actually become a huge cheerleader for Ember. I am guessing that for every guy who takes the time to complain, there are probably ten more people who just visit some library's site, try the demo and cruise the docs, and if it doesn't work, say "this isn't worth more of my time, next." That this guy stuck around and detailed what needed work really does say something.
seivan 14y ago
The only truth I've seen is on the first page of http://batmanjs.org http://batmanjs.org It is _THAT_ easy :)
electic 14y ago
People rave about node.js and kock ruby. People rave about ember and knock backbone. But when it comes to building apps, the tried and true approaches are the best I've found. There is plenty of documentation online and that really helps when you are starting out. When I gave ember a whirl, the lack of documentation, forums, or just anyone using it -- outside a core group -- was very disturbing.
- fennecfoxen 14y ago
  I just gave Ember a whirl the other day because I wanted to fiddle around with a prototype for an experimental interface. I'd had a little exposure to Ember and related projects before, and generally liked it, but hadn't really set it up entirely from scratch. It was... amazingly annoying. And I don't just mean the fact that I needed to search around for a box that had an appropriate version of Ruby installed to build the ember-data project from source (heaven forbid that they offer a download of JavaScript, let alone a single package of all the libraries you're going to want to use for your project -- but it's okay, I'll forgive you, you're a release candidate). I mean the stuff where I wanted to load a simple skeletal data structure in JavaScript from JSON with a FixtureAdapter before attaching it to a real backend, and the documentation was all "sure, you can totally use a non-REST store!" -- http://emberjs.com/guides/models/defining-a-store/ http://emberjs.com/guides/models/defining-a-store/ -- but wasn't really strong on the How. Fortunately, StackOverflow came to my rescue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301918/how-do-you-set-the-default-store-to-a-fixtureadapter-in-ember-js http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301918/how-do-you-set-t... But it was a negative experience. If I hadn't been exposed to a taste of its power and elegance before, I would have probably given up.
- pekk 14y ago
  Erm, backbone is not exactly trivial for fresh newbies to learn...
  - slantyyz 14y ago
    That might be true, but the documentation is fairly comprehensive and well done. The docs were indispensable for me when learning how to use it.
davidroetzel 14y ago
It really is not easy. I really want to like Ember, I really do. But I also gave up after being unable to wrap my head around it. I read the official documentation, which is well written, but does not cover the big picture needed to tie everything together. I watched the peepcode screencast, which is great, even if for me the pace could have been a bit faster. After that I was convinced I wanted to give Ember a shot. I failed very early on, wanting to accomplish two things that I guess should be very common. But neither one is documented anywhere. And while I found a few answers on SO, those usually used functions that were either not documented at all or where the documented said they were meant for something else entirely. The first thing was integration with server side authentication. The foundation was a pretty standard rails app that handled authentication. I wanted access to the current_user from the Ember App. The second thing was loading a few models together with the initial page in order to save additional calls to the server. I do not even know where to look for documentation on how to accomplish this. It probably does not help that Ember Data is a seperate project. Ember without Ember Data is no way near as useful as the combination of both. Again, I really want to like Ember. I love Yehuda's work on other projects and some Ember features like data binding look awesome. But trying to use Ember to write a new app from scratch that deviates slightly from basic CRUD gives me a headache.
- mark_l_watson 14y ago
  Am I making a mistake waiting on Ember-Data? I thought it was still in flux. The reason I have spent so much time recently with 1.0rc1 is that I finally expect Ember.js to be stable. I have just been using AJAx to manually fetch data as required.
- benburton 14y ago
  I've been trying to put together a basic demo project that seems to do most of the things you're asking about: https://github.com/benburton/trakio https://github.com/benburton/trakio Hopefully it can be of use!
rxcfc 14y ago
Moved to the correct thread per @kbenson's response
- kbenson 14y ago
  You responded in the wrong order. The important point is that Ember is trying to improve, and values the feedback, right? Defending another team member that you didn't think represented himself well should be secondary. He's a grown man, and can defend himself if needed (especially from the fallout of his own words). Addressing this first just gives me the impression that Ember is focusing on, and learning the wrong lesson, from this problem.
  - rxcfc 14y ago
    You're right, this should have specifically been in response to the post that was expressing frustration with Trek.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
wycats 14y ago
I totally agree that our getting started story could be much better. In fact, it's our primary focus as we move towards 1.0. Specifically: * We're actively working on a Getting Started Guide with live examples that walks the user through building a new application from scratch. * We're continuing to improve our guides to talk through areas that might be confusing for new developers, like the naming conventions[1] we use in Ember * Ember 1.0 will feature the return of the Starter Kit[2], which directly addresses the concerns by the OP. We removed it temporarily to bring it up to date with the most recent idioms, but it will be coming back very soon[2]. This was a hard decision that sucked, but leaving around an out of date starter kit seemed worse than removing it. I take this concern very seriously, and hope that people will continue to give us a look as we improve the experience for new users. [1] http://emberjs.com/guides/concepts/naming-conventions/ http://emberjs.com/guides/concepts/naming-conventions/ [2] https://github.com/emberjs/starter-kit https://github.com/emberjs/starter-kit
- trolley 14y ago
  This is the response that should have been made on OP's original thread in the first place (and I do see you've xposted it there now).
  - wycats 14y ago
    Totally agree. The OP posted at 4:05 a.m., when I was very much asleep. I've been a little bit less responsive this week in general as I've been participating in TAG[1] this week. I'm very sorry that our project came across as uncaring. [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/
    - knowtheory 14y ago
      Should anyone doubt it, wycats & the ember team certainly do care a great deal about their users. The Ember team and Backbone team have differing philosophies about client side development, but wycats, tomdale and the rest of the crew are smart guys trying to do the right thing.
Fando 14y ago
What an obvious oversight. It is unbelievable that the developers would allow for a 'getting started' guide with such a poor first impression to exist. I have had a similar experience with jquery. As someone who has been using mootools before jquery I was completely furious with the lack of proper documentation and ambiguity in it. I hated learning jquery. Thank god mootools exists. Confusing, incomplete or ambiguous documentation is the absolute worst obstacle to a positive learning experience. I've not tried Ember, but if the experience is as the author describes, then I shall stick to angularjs. And what a tragic reaction to the criticism from the ember developer. It seems fitting that their documentation would be crappy. I'm sure that ember is a wonderful project and took a lot of hard work to create, but please fix the first experience - is important otherwise all that hard work goes to waste. Good luck.
ehutch79 14y ago
If the new user 'try this out' tutorial is busted, and the core team knows this. why is ember being pushed so hard? recently there were many articles on HN itself about how great ember is. if it's so great, why is it people get frustrated with the most simple tutorial? Why was the response 'i refuse to respond' instead of 'this is a known issue, we're working on it as fast as we can'?
ErikRogneby 14y ago
trek: "I definitely feel your frustration. The tone of this topic is not in line with the civil level of discourse I'd like to maintain here, so I cannot respond." Wow, could that response be any more passive aggressive?
- re_todd 14y ago
  Good point, and very thin-skinned. On the other hand, isn't this how many developers think and act? At least trek is being honest about it.
  - ErikRogneby 14y ago
    many or most? I think of most developers as folks who are asked questions "is it possible to do X?" and can't help answering "yes, but..." of course it's possible. And would equally be embarrassed when their code doesn't live up to marketing spin. I also think any developer worth their salt is going to respond sheepish and apologetic when their code neither adheres to convention of the collective hacker zeitgeist or is documented sufficiently for someone reasonable to get it up and running quickly. Maybe we need a new acronym: SNAP! "Sensitive new age programmer"
thwest 14y ago
Shoutout to everyone on freenode's #emberjs that has helped me work through these troubles.
robotmay 14y ago
Does anyone know of a JS framework which plays nicely with Server Sent Events or WebSockets? I've tried pretty much everything so far, and it's always a colossal hack to implement, as none of them seem to have been built with anything other than CRUD in mind.
- kaoD 14y ago
  SocketStream which is built around RPC (at least it was like that on 0.3 which I tried) and Derby.js which is build around model-view binding. I used both a long time ago, not sure if they're still maintained.
  - robotmay 14y ago
    Ah I quite like those two, but I was hoping for some client-side ones as most of my projects are in Ruby :) I should try a project on Node again at some point, it has been quite a while.
    - kaoD 14y ago
      It seems to me that this isn't feasible in pure client side because the server would have to agree on some kind of protocol. Server-side is mandatory here. Unfortunately I cannot recommend any since I don't do Ruby :( Maybe you don't need a framework but just a JSON-RPC[1] library. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-RPC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-RPC
      - robotmay 14y ago
        I'm really just looking for a model system that allows simple updates of objects in its identity map with data from an arbitrary source. Backbone is the closest I've found to supporting this with the least effort. I'd rather like to use Server Sent Events, as there's decent support in a variety of languages and it's pretty simple; it's just that no current frameworks seem to have been built with those sorts of technologies in mind. I've largely resigned myself to having to hack support into anything I try.
ryan_f 14y ago
Isn't all of this just blown out of proportion? Why not focus on how to help improve ember.js than one person's response? Even if that person contributes to the documentation and to the project. Get over it already.
- kanja 14y ago
  It's incredibly out of proportion - but people really want to use ember (because it promises all these great things!) and they're frustrated by the docs (because they're not really good for first time users) so this is kind of a flash point.
melc 14y ago
From personal experience in order to get started just checking out the documentation(i had started with the old documentation now called guides) should be fine. Some googling around might be needed but should not take much time. Generally i agree that it is a bit hard to get used to the framework, but if one has the ability to look in the console and figure out errors, should not really have any problems getting started with emberjs. Also just grabbing code from the first page, i don't think is a really good idea. Does this technique work with other popular frameworks like http://nodejs.org/ http://nodejs.org/ http://jquery.com/ http://jquery.com/ .... ?
desireco42 14y ago
Thank you for writing this. That is all I am going to say.
tibbon 14y ago
About nine months ago, I tried Ember. I'm not a huge javascript guy, but I'm pretty good in Rails and have written a handful of javascript things. But anyway, I just couldn't get the stuff to work. All the tutorials, walkthroughs, getting started guides, git repos.... just tons of cryptic errors, strange behavior and terrible documentation. It seemed cool. I really wanted to like it. But- I essentially got "the documentation is in the code" as an answer. I don't know why Javascript programmers can't be bothered to return meaningful errors that actually hint at fixing the problem, especially when they are super common errors that everyone hits (such as the Handlebars version thing that was mentioned here).
saintx 14y ago
It's a revealing commentary on the nature of the project and its developer community that this entire conversation seems to be about one dude. Suddenly, the "ember.js" brand collapses and becomes subsumed by the "trek" brand. All other factors aside, it doesn't sound like the sort of healthy, active project that I like to use.
laureny 14y ago
Regardless of the technical difference between Angular and Ember, I have to say that the Angular documentation is one of the best I have ever read for a software library. I'm not just talking about how it's written (it's English, it's technical, the bar is pretty low) but how they structured it to address exactly what the OP is complaining about: each code listing is shown in a multi-tab pages showing 1) the .html files 2) the .js files and 3) the .css files. The only thing that could make it even better would be a direct link to a jsfidle (externally or internally hosted) so I can try and tweak all these examples without having to write my own, but it's already excellent as it is. I hope more libraries follow this documentation model.
Vekz 14y ago
Beyond Ember.js this is a highly constructive approach to any API Library you are developing. Developers tend to disregard User Experience when building out tools for other developers. Put yourself in a first time users perspective like this and try to relate to that stream of consciousness.
doki_pen 14y ago
A decent screencast: http://toranbillups.com/blog/archive/2013/03/02/emberjs-rc1-introduction-screencast/ http://toranbillups.com/blog/archive/2013/03/02/emberjs-rc1-...
undoware 14y ago
I think that a lot of the kurfuffle viz. trek's response is a forum cultural shear. Trek's site is on Discourse, which has its own stricter rules of engagement that supercede those of the broader FOSS community. The rules on Discourse are moreover reasonable and well-advertised, even if you (or I) find them a touch stilted. It is trek's right and freedom to maintain whatever culture he sees fit on his site.
pixelhandler 14y ago
I would like to say "nothing is easy"; a mentor taught me that long ago. Also, when I read on the Ember home page that Ember is for building ambitious web applications, right a way I though I better read all the docs, the source code, and the tests to get to know what Ember does. Since nothing is easy I would say that the Ember community is totally aware of that and very helpful. I was very impressed by the guides and the api docs. Reading the Ember source and especially the tests has helped me to begin to understand how Ember works. For me getting started with Ember was not about completing a TODO app or just watching a tutorial video and then pounding out some code. But instead has been about studying existing applications like the Discourse application or the Travis app. I recently say I sweet Emberpress app much like the iOS app "Letterpress" and was amazed at how well the code just makes sense. Getting started with Ember takes ambition and IMHO is well worth the investment.
mgrassotti 14y ago
Since my old stackoverflow answer was referenced in this topic , i've updated it to include a MVP QuickStart Guide. Hopefully this helps delvarworld and others get started with ember. Feedback welcome :-) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14204674/how-to-architect-an-ember-js-application/14205734#14205734 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14204674/how-to-architect...
dysoco 14y ago
Well damn, that's what you get for choosing something new and Bleeding Edge. People expect a lot of documentations, tutorials, good community and comercial support for something that was released a couple months ago...
- modarts 14y ago
  The problem is the fact that the marketing copy on the site + the messaging by the contributors would lead one to assume that Ember is pretty well polished, stable and ready to build big things on top of -today-.
mark_l_watson 14y ago
I have some sympathy for the author of this comment. I have probably spent 25 hours trying to spin up on Ember.js in the last few weeks, concentrating both on Ember.js itself, and how to work with REST back ends written in Node.js and in Clojure (I have a few simple examples of this in public github repos). Yesterday I struggled getting simple auth working. I am taking it a bit on faith that this work will pay off, even though my usual development "use cases" are fairly simple web apps where I just use a little AJAX (often pjax). I am assuming that if I master Ember.js then I will build more complex stuff. I like Ember.js and Node.js - a light weight development kit. A few years ago I was doing GWT/SmartGWT for a customer: produces nice interactive web apps but development feels like running through mud.
FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
I think the OP in that thread wrote a pretty amazing post, in all honesty. Unlike your typical "it doesn't work" or "this sucks", the frustrated individual still takes care to detail, step by step, exactly what felt wrong or what was missing. In doing so, they demonstrate exactly why it's so frustrating. There's feedback not only on the quality of the documentation, but the experience of getting an Ember app up and running. While improving the former would make life a bit simpler, the setup seemingly being so involved - requiring you to manually resolve missing dependencies - still diminishes the initial experience. All of this makes it surprising that someone would totally dismiss it in such an unceremonious manner, and for reasons that are totally at conflict with what doubles up as a support forum. Is that discussion board there as a flagship Discourse site, or for support?
zaius 14y ago
I've had a lot of trouble with learning ember while dealing with all the breaking changes as it's moved towards 1.0. The ember core team have said they're updating docs, and trying to get outdated tutorials marked as such, but until that time it's still a bit of a minefield. So, if you'd like to chat about ember with other people learning, and not just have a channel full of unanswered questions (i.e. #emberjs), come join me on freenode at #emberjs-chat
gbadman 14y ago
For those who are finding it difficult to get a hello world up and running, see: http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:5206526?p=preview http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:5206526?p=preview
DelvarWorld 14y ago
haha hey I wrote this reply on their forum. I had no idea it topped out HN. sucks that they froze it. wanna give this comment upvotes so my karma goes above 0? my intention was never to cause a shit storm. I just banged out a thread on their forum and fell asleep. I just wanted an ember quick start tutorial. and I eventually got linked to one. i'm still going to try out ember later with it. it's poopy that the thread got froze with so many people having the same problem. i had no idea it was such a major pain point for the library. my only advice would be that sarcastic tones are usually the most helpful, if they're not insulting.
ebryn 14y ago
FYI, Rob Conery just posted a great post that addresses the exact issues the OP had: http://wekeroad.com/2013/03/20/ember-baby-steps http://wekeroad.com/2013/03/20/ember-baby-steps
ef4 14y ago
I'm going to offer some unsolicited advice. The constructive way to deal with a project that you find interesting but undocumented or otherwise unpolished is to attack. Attack the bugs one by one as you hit them. Go straight to the source and read, read, read. Ain't nobody got time for that? Ah, but grasshopper, it seems hugely difficult to you because you lack practice. If you get in the habit of attacking code like this, you will get faster and faster at it. And then the next time a project comes along that's cool, bleeding-edge, and undocumented, you'll just pick it up and be working in no time. Reading is the secret weapon that turns a mediocre programmer into a great programmer. You need to read a lot of other people's source code. And a situation like the one in this post is ideal: you have a specific problem you're trying to solve, and you have access to all the relevant source code. If you really don't have time because you need to ship yesterday, then why are you trying to use pre-1.0 software? Go use something boring and proven.
- polshaw 14y ago
  Why not put that effort into learning JS instead of fixing someone else's JS framework?
  - ef4 14y ago
    Your question implies that frameworks are only for people who don't know Javascript. You might want to reconsider that.
jam_tmrw 14y ago
Love ember!!!
regularfry 14y ago
This sounds... familiar. Precisely this sort of experience with Ember led me to write a Getting Started tutorial: https://github.com/regularfry/website/blob/master/source/guides/getting-started/your-first-ember-app.md https://github.com/regularfry/website/blob/master/source/gui...
gcao 14y ago
With my due respect to guys behind Ember, I don't understand why Ember gets so much attention. It has been in works for 4~5 years now but has not reached its 1.0 status. I've seen many complaints about its learning curve, documentation etc. However, when people talk about Javascript web frameworks to learn, it is often brought up as a candidate. Maybe someone can tell me why people think it will be a serious contender in this fast moving area.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
readme 14y ago
This is a good example of a bad attitude. This person was someone who had the skills to plow through the frustrations and could have made a contribution by writing that missing tutorial, but instead chose to gripe.
jcolemorr11 14y ago
Died laughing when I saw this title because it's exactly what I thought about Ember. For speed of development I kept flirting with Ember because of the "positives" I've heard. The oddities of its ecosystem and the rather disgruntled/angered contributors backlash towards negative feedback has really cast a negative shadow on it.

391 points by floydpink 14y ago

trolley 14y ago

Trek doesn't like this guy's tone, therefore he "can't" respond?

nsxwolf 14y ago
The guy didn't sound "uncivil" to me, he just sounded frustrated. If what he reported is accurate, the frustration seems totally understandable.
- Filligree 14y ago
  It's definitely understandable. I spent about two weeks forcing my way to a functional Ember application, because the framework seemed to have promise. In the process I needed to bother the developers on IRC, read a nontrivial fraction of the Ember JS code, and implement missing Ember functionality from scratch (KVO-compliant dictionaries). Ember doesn't work unless you get everything right, and doesn't provide much in the way of diagnostics, so it was one of the harshest learning curves I've ever run into. They really need to work on their tutorials. It works really well now, though. :X
- arkitaip 14y ago
  He was sarcastic but that's hardly being uncivil. Thing is, his complaint is probably very representative of many beginners so giving the impression that you're ignoring it can have a very negative impact on a project like Ember.js.
niggler 14y ago
(FTR: I think his reaction was deplorable) By din of its presence on the front page of HN he has to say something, but doesn't actually want to engage in what probably would become a massive ember-bashing thread by others who were frustrated with ember, so he acknowledged receipt without giving a formal response.
- patejam 14y ago
  It's quite simple and sufficient to say something along the lines of "You are right, we are working on this. In the mean time check out some example code here...".
  - niggler 14y ago
    (I fully agree with you and I think the guy's comment was really poor) "You are right" admits that it is not currently easy, and I don't think he wanted to say that outright.
    - moron4hire 14y ago
      There is nothing wrong with admitting you were wrong or admitting someone else was right. It shows maturity.
rquantz 14y ago
Apparently when you need help you're supposed to wait a few hours to cool down before you actually post your question.
- maligree 14y ago
  Not sure how serious you are, but I hate what you just said. It's like.. YOUR software made me frustrated, don't tell me to just wait it off. The reason I'm talking to you like this is YOUR code. And sure, when it's just raving, that may be right, but the guy genuinely TRIED and went through hoop after hoop.
  - jvzr 14y ago
    He was being sarcastic. I'm pretty sure you both agree to the same point.
    - maligree 14y ago
      Fist bump* then. * - or any other commonly accepted ritual interpretable as "we cool, we cool". The cooler the better.
      - rquantz 14y ago
        Hmm, I wasn't exactly thinking of it as sarcasm when I wrote it, more pointing out what trek seemed to be expecting, which seemed unreasonable to me. But I guess doing that amounts to the same thing as sarcasm. Fist bump* in return.
        jvzr 14y ago
        I heart the love in that thread, guys!
Kiro 14y ago
trek just convinced me not to use Ember.
bvdbijl 14y ago
That reaction is incredibly smug
sdogruyol 14y ago
he's way too "can't" actually more like cba to respond.
_ak 14y ago
Because, you know, ad hominem claims of lack of civility will always get you around the issue of having to face and talk about the pain points in your software.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

patejam 14y ago

Not a very good way to handle potential users. It is quite the turn off while deciding between different JS frameworks to have someone representing the codebase refusing to respond to a user's troubles.

mootothemax 14y ago

This is pretty much why I didn't end up using Ember in a new project. After getting the same errors and figuring out the same solutions, I figured I had better things to do with my time. It's a real shame, but just like developing web apps, you need to make sure users have a good first experience, otherwise they'll run away.

charlietran 14y ago
Did you find a suitable alternative to Ember?
- mootothemax 14y ago
  Did you find a suitable alternative to Ember? I went with Amber in the end. I can't remember if it was more or less painful initially, but at that point I had spite in my fingers. Not sure if there's also a lesson in that for startups: will you get lucky with some users just because they've had a bad experience immediately prior to checking you out?
  - mark_l_watson 14y ago
    Please talk a bit more about Amber. Easy to work with back end REST services? Easy to deploy?
    - mootothemax 14y ago
      Please talk a bit more about Amber. Easy to work with back end REST services? Easy to deploy? I used it to build a very basic Jabber/XMPP client in a little over a day, integrating with an existing system. That's the only project I've used it in so far, and I'm still very much a beginner user. All I can say is that it solved a problem with the minimum of fuss and inside quite a strict time budget, so I'm very happy with it.
- TranceMan 14y ago
  Check out http://angularjs.org http://angularjs.org ;) Plenty of very good introduction videos on youtube

VMG 14y ago

The all caps headline is a little too much for my taste.

andrewingram 14y ago
I suspect he just copied and pasted the text from the homepage.
DanWaterworth 14y ago
... says the one with the all caps user name. It's not quite the same, I know. I saw your comment and had to respond.
- VMG 14y ago
  I'd change it to lowercase if I knew how
VMG 14y ago
Thanks to whoever changed it
joshrotenberg 14y ago
Apparently someone likes the all caps version: http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/36418027.jpg http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/36418027.jpg

Hovertruck 14y ago

This was my experience when I tried to use Ember as well. Very frustrating.

mhinze 14y ago

I'm so numb to this kind of pain...

gosukiwi 14y ago

With all the time and frustration needed to learn Ember just do it with Backbone

modarts 14y ago
This was pretty much my pathway to developing my current app on Backbone. I think Backbone hits the sweet spot in terms of abstraction needed to structure an application in a maintainable way (and plays pretty nicely with require.js, which buys you a much better ability to break your app apart)

__herson__ 14y ago

Well, programming is not always easy. I felt that kind of frustation when I tried for the first time almost every library/programming language that I'd worked with, either with java, backbone, coldfusion, rails... Trying and researching things is always part of the process, we can't run away from that.

mootothemax 14y ago
Trying and researching things is always part of the process, we can't run away from that. You're right: there will always be a learning curve, whatever is being learnt. I think the problem with Ember is that it makes the opposite claims, and fails to deliver, only because the documentation is lacking.
- __herson__ 14y ago
  Yes, I meant that when I start to learn thing like java and rails, everybody said that these product were easier than "x", but I didn't find them that way.
glanch 14y ago
Just because it's always been that way doesn't mean it has to be. If I'm running Ember, today I'm seeing this post and my takeaway is "we need to create a fool-proof quickstart hello world tutorial and make it readily visible to first-timers ASAP", not "this guy is a dick, let's ignore him".
trolley 14y ago
> Well, programming is not always easy. Nobody is saying that it is. OP's title was directly in response to the ember.js homepage (where it says "GETTING STARTED WITH EMBER.JS IS EASY."). S/he encountered some (pretty understandable) frustration and pointed out a few major shortfalls in ember's documentation, before asking for assistance; that's not at all running away from "the process". Waving away legitimate (non-trolling) complaints in a dismissive way is pretty condescending, and not at all helpful to the main issue.
mikeash 14y ago

kaolinite 14y ago

Agree with this - I was planning to use Ember on a new project but quickly fell through holes in the documentation and had to give up and return to plain Backbone.

nkozyra 14y ago

Well the "it's easy" is the selling point, no? I suppose the "ease" of using it depends on one's aptitude. 8-)

nkozyra 14y ago

As an addendum, I tried Ember out and found it to be fairly easy. Is it plug and play, so to speak? No. Will it work in about 5 minutes, assuming you're well-versed in client- and server-side Javascript? It should. "Easy" in this case means for the intended audience. Turning on a computer is "easy," but not if you tasked someone who'd just traveled from 1800 to do it.

joshstrange 14y ago

Trek is making a huge mistake IMHO. As a developer I can think of nothing more helpful than to get a "steam-of-consciousness" excerpt from our users. This is something no analytics package can tell you, if you want to make your "product" easy to use then this is the exact feedback you need. Delverworld was outlining the various pitfalls of getting started with ember.js and a core contributor shrugs it off because he didn't like the guys attitude? No one likes having their shortcomings pointed out but it would have made much more sense for Trek to admit that getting started could be made easier and that the Ember.js team would look into ways to make it easier. Ignoring the issue like he is "above it" is pretty fucking pretentious if you ask me.

mootothemax 14y ago
No one likes having their shortcomings pointed out but it would have made much more sense for Trek to admit that getting started could be made easier and that the Ember.js team would look into ways to make it easier Agreed. I recently had a new user point out in quite spectacularly a direct fashion how unfriendly the "Getting Started" section of one of my apps is. It made painful reading, but I would happily pay for users to get in touch like that.
- joshstrange 14y ago
  Same here, I used to be much more of a "hot-head" when it came to things like this (I'm still not perfect, far from it) but I try not to take things as personally, at the end of the day if it makes my product better then I should shut up and be happy.
vanderZwan 14y ago
I'm studying interaction design in Sweden at the moment. This is exactly the point they're drilling into our arrogant heads: you're not a genius, listen to your users. And then you actually have to convince your clients that they are not geniuses, that being an expert can also make you blind to things, and that they need to listen to their users. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design

retube 14y ago

Hmm. I wonder what this emberjs is? I'll just click the home page link and find out. Oh. That just gives me the discussion board, which i'm already on. A bit more looking, a bit more hovering, and.... there isn't one. Close tab.

bhauer 14y ago
This seems like a variant of PBSALTPH, a silly initialism I coined when I found myself ranting about product blogs that don't link to product home pages [1]. Generally speaking, any subdomain or isolated "region" of a product web site should always provide a prominent link back to the product's home page. A good option is to use the product's logo as that link. Using the logo to link to anything other than the product home page is a crime against the gods of user experience. [1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pbsaltph http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pbsaltph
- joshstrange 14y ago
  Could not agree more, there was a post on HN about this recently[1] and I also found this[2] one when searching for the first. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5267330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5267330 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034972

pkorzeniewski 14y ago

I'm always put off by the "look what can be done in just several lines!" code examples on frameworks front pages, they don't represent anything about the framework and usually the simpler the example, the more complex the framework is because everything is "magic" - try to do something differently and you end up hacking the framework internals.

moe 14y ago
It's especially offending when, as in this case, the bragging code-snippet omits half of the code that is needed to actually run the demo. Ember is far from the only project guilty of this. If you want to brag to me then make sure I can copy/paste your example to a file and it will run. I'll take a honest 50-liner over a dysfunct 10-liner any day.

delambo 14y ago

Trek must have been a perl monk, back in the day.

_ak 14y ago

> The tone of this topic is not in line with the civil level of discourse I'd like to maintain here, so I cannot respond. This sounds like the euphemistic version of "I don't like your attitude, so fuck off." Not exactly the answer I would want to get as a new user who is stumbling over terrible and inconsistent documentation and error messages.

milkshakes 14y ago
At least it's consistent with his "documentation czar" title. Definitely sounds like a Czar to me.
rxcfc 14y ago
I agree that Trek's response here is not very helpful. However he has spent countless hours working on Ember's documentation and the fact that it's where it is now is due to his dedication. There's clearly more work to be done and we're all very well aware of that. We've been working on a getting started tutorial but it's been slow going since all of us on the Core Team are very busy with our day jobs. We hope to get something out for everyone as soon as possible.
- joshstrange 14y ago
  That may very well be true but it doesn't change the fact that his response was very negative (much more so than the OP's) and for no good reason. The OP did not say "Trek sucks, his attempt at documentation is laughable" in fact I would venture a guess that the OP had no idea who Trek was prior to his posting. This was not an attack against Trek or the work he has done but rather a frustrated programmer explaining his predicament and asking for help and Trek told him he wasn't worth his time. If that's not pouring gas on the fire I don't know what is. If I were the OP I would completely abandoned trying to learn Ember.js after a comment like that, talk about kicking a man when he is already down.
almost 14y ago
Yes, that immediately turns me off the project. This is great feedback and not at all rude, I wish I could get feedback like this for my projects!

patrickaljord 14y ago

Had a similar experience, then tried AngularJS. Couldn't be happier :) http://angularjs.org http://angularjs.org

tlarkworthy 14y ago
same
tixocloud 14y ago
Same here - well documented although a lot of technical stuff involved but the fact that they use git for tutorials is nice. Loved playing around and being able to revert my changes back to the original state.
thiderman 14y ago
Exactly the same here. I really wanted to like Ember, since I liked the documentation and read a bit about how the project started and how it works on a higher level. However, since I couldn't get through the Get Started tutorial, I gave up and went into angular instead, and I haven't looked back. I'd like to give Ember a second chance, if only so I could be the only person on the internet that has tried both angular and Ember on a deeper level, but right now I'm not sure I'd do any better should I actually try again.
- senoroink 14y ago
  I reviewed both angular and ember for integration with a rails app for my job recently: https://github.com/et/ember_vs_angular https://github.com/et/ember_vs_angular To my dismay, we went with angular. In retrospect, after playing with the framework, I'm fairly pleased with the choice.
LandoCalrissian 14y ago
Angular is really great, just used it on a project for work. Didn't take long to pick up at all and I had things humming along in a few ours. Their documentation is pretty nice and there are a ton of great tutorials.
14y ago

neya 14y ago

In my personal opinion, I'd like to present a fair comparison with another similar framework called KnockoutJS. I challenge anyone on Hackernews to show me better documentation than this one: http://learn.knockoutjs.com http://learn.knockoutjs.com Notice how things are explained so well as if they were explained to a child, this is how you should document, IMO. Also, RP Neimeyer, the creator (EDIT: Committer) of this framework, has dedicated a significant portion of his life to helping out new comers to the framework, by having a separate website (http://knockmeout.net http://knockmeout.net) (apart from the one above) to train and help people understand KnockoutJS. This is the kind of effort every developer should put in, IMO, if they want people to get off the ground with their framework.

hmottestad 14y ago
I didn't like it. Too much visual overhead. I didn't know where to look. Also a few things went wrong (don't know what). I was clicking around in code window when the tutorial guide on the left disappeared, then I tried refreshing and everything went blank. So I clicked on url in the navbar and pressed enter. Now the page loaded. But everything was blank inside the boxes. OSX 10.8.3 with chrome. Ohh, I found out what went wrong. I tried scrolling in the code window and the browser went back to the last page which it thinks is: http://learn.knockoutjs.com/ http://learn.knockoutjs.com/ and that makes the tutorial disappear.
tixocloud 14y ago
Agreed - customer service at its finest and no doubt something we should all aspire to if we want to increase adoption.
quarterto 14y ago
RP Niemeyer did not create Knockout. That was Steve Sanderson. Niemeyer has make but 9 commits to the Knockout codebase¹. Knockout's tutorials are great. However, the rest of the documentation takes the form of other, slightly less helpful tutorials. The only API documentation is reading the code. ¹ https://github.com/SteveSanderson/knockout/commits?author=rniemeyer https://github.com/SteveSanderson/knockout/commits?author=rn...

scottcanoni 14y ago

Bad move Trek.

clebio 14y ago

This is all spot on. And despite the somewhat humorous, but not at all rude tone, this guy did some real leg-work to type this up. Documenting something in that much detail takes a lot of time (he went so far as to find the missing dependencies, and copied in the error messages at each step). Duck-debugging often works because you have to get specific, and logging issues is the same. I've had this same experience with Node.js (http://nodejs.org/ http://nodejs.org/), whose homepage links to API Docs (not at all introductory or even linear). Granted, they don't say 'easy', but good documentation is still nice to have. Compare to Django documentation, which is expansive. And I understand that these various frameworks are for seasoned developers who don't need HTML closing tags explained to them. But there are so many platforms and tools out there, and they so often take you from 'toy' to 'enterprise-scale' in this sparsely documented way.

slantyyz 14y ago
>> this guy did some real leg-work to type this up This is important to note. The guy obviously wants to use Ember. To me that's a signal that if you help the guy out or address his complaints, that he might actually become a huge cheerleader for Ember. I am guessing that for every guy who takes the time to complain, there are probably ten more people who just visit some library's site, try the demo and cruise the docs, and if it doesn't work, say "this isn't worth more of my time, next." That this guy stuck around and detailed what needed work really does say something.

seivan 14y ago

The only truth I've seen is on the first page of http://batmanjs.org http://batmanjs.org It is _THAT_ easy :)

electic 14y ago

People rave about node.js and kock ruby. People rave about ember and knock backbone. But when it comes to building apps, the tried and true approaches are the best I've found. There is plenty of documentation online and that really helps when you are starting out. When I gave ember a whirl, the lack of documentation, forums, or just anyone using it -- outside a core group -- was very disturbing.

fennecfoxen 14y ago
I just gave Ember a whirl the other day because I wanted to fiddle around with a prototype for an experimental interface. I'd had a little exposure to Ember and related projects before, and generally liked it, but hadn't really set it up entirely from scratch. It was... amazingly annoying. And I don't just mean the fact that I needed to search around for a box that had an appropriate version of Ruby installed to build the ember-data project from source (heaven forbid that they offer a download of JavaScript, let alone a single package of all the libraries you're going to want to use for your project -- but it's okay, I'll forgive you, you're a release candidate). I mean the stuff where I wanted to load a simple skeletal data structure in JavaScript from JSON with a FixtureAdapter before attaching it to a real backend, and the documentation was all "sure, you can totally use a non-REST store!" -- http://emberjs.com/guides/models/defining-a-store/ http://emberjs.com/guides/models/defining-a-store/ -- but wasn't really strong on the How. Fortunately, StackOverflow came to my rescue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301918/how-do-you-set-the-default-store-to-a-fixtureadapter-in-ember-js http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301918/how-do-you-set-t... But it was a negative experience. If I hadn't been exposed to a taste of its power and elegance before, I would have probably given up.
pekk 14y ago
Erm, backbone is not exactly trivial for fresh newbies to learn...
- slantyyz 14y ago
  That might be true, but the documentation is fairly comprehensive and well done. The docs were indispensable for me when learning how to use it.

davidroetzel 14y ago

It really is not easy. I really want to like Ember, I really do. But I also gave up after being unable to wrap my head around it. I read the official documentation, which is well written, but does not cover the big picture needed to tie everything together. I watched the peepcode screencast, which is great, even if for me the pace could have been a bit faster. After that I was convinced I wanted to give Ember a shot. I failed very early on, wanting to accomplish two things that I guess should be very common. But neither one is documented anywhere. And while I found a few answers on SO, those usually used functions that were either not documented at all or where the documented said they were meant for something else entirely. The first thing was integration with server side authentication. The foundation was a pretty standard rails app that handled authentication. I wanted access to the current_user from the Ember App. The second thing was loading a few models together with the initial page in order to save additional calls to the server. I do not even know where to look for documentation on how to accomplish this. It probably does not help that Ember Data is a seperate project. Ember without Ember Data is no way near as useful as the combination of both. Again, I really want to like Ember. I love Yehuda's work on other projects and some Ember features like data binding look awesome. But trying to use Ember to write a new app from scratch that deviates slightly from basic CRUD gives me a headache.

mark_l_watson 14y ago
Am I making a mistake waiting on Ember-Data? I thought it was still in flux. The reason I have spent so much time recently with 1.0rc1 is that I finally expect Ember.js to be stable. I have just been using AJAx to manually fetch data as required.
benburton 14y ago
I've been trying to put together a basic demo project that seems to do most of the things you're asking about: https://github.com/benburton/trakio https://github.com/benburton/trakio Hopefully it can be of use!

rxcfc 14y ago

Moved to the correct thread per @kbenson's response

kbenson 14y ago
You responded in the wrong order. The important point is that Ember is trying to improve, and values the feedback, right? Defending another team member that you didn't think represented himself well should be secondary. He's a grown man, and can defend himself if needed (especially from the fallout of his own words). Addressing this first just gives me the impression that Ember is focusing on, and learning the wrong lesson, from this problem.
- rxcfc 14y ago
  You're right, this should have specifically been in response to the post that was expressing frustration with Trek.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

wycats 14y ago

I totally agree that our getting started story could be much better. In fact, it's our primary focus as we move towards 1.0. Specifically: * We're actively working on a Getting Started Guide with live examples that walks the user through building a new application from scratch. * We're continuing to improve our guides to talk through areas that might be confusing for new developers, like the naming conventions[1] we use in Ember * Ember 1.0 will feature the return of the Starter Kit[2], which directly addresses the concerns by the OP. We removed it temporarily to bring it up to date with the most recent idioms, but it will be coming back very soon[2]. This was a hard decision that sucked, but leaving around an out of date starter kit seemed worse than removing it. I take this concern very seriously, and hope that people will continue to give us a look as we improve the experience for new users. [1] http://emberjs.com/guides/concepts/naming-conventions/ http://emberjs.com/guides/concepts/naming-conventions/ [2] https://github.com/emberjs/starter-kit https://github.com/emberjs/starter-kit

trolley 14y ago
This is the response that should have been made on OP's original thread in the first place (and I do see you've xposted it there now).
- wycats 14y ago
  Totally agree. The OP posted at 4:05 a.m., when I was very much asleep. I've been a little bit less responsive this week in general as I've been participating in TAG[1] this week. I'm very sorry that our project came across as uncaring. [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/
  - knowtheory 14y ago
    Should anyone doubt it, wycats & the ember team certainly do care a great deal about their users. The Ember team and Backbone team have differing philosophies about client side development, but wycats, tomdale and the rest of the crew are smart guys trying to do the right thing.

Fando 14y ago

What an obvious oversight. It is unbelievable that the developers would allow for a 'getting started' guide with such a poor first impression to exist. I have had a similar experience with jquery. As someone who has been using mootools before jquery I was completely furious with the lack of proper documentation and ambiguity in it. I hated learning jquery. Thank god mootools exists. Confusing, incomplete or ambiguous documentation is the absolute worst obstacle to a positive learning experience. I've not tried Ember, but if the experience is as the author describes, then I shall stick to angularjs. And what a tragic reaction to the criticism from the ember developer. It seems fitting that their documentation would be crappy. I'm sure that ember is a wonderful project and took a lot of hard work to create, but please fix the first experience - is important otherwise all that hard work goes to waste. Good luck.

ehutch79 14y ago

If the new user 'try this out' tutorial is busted, and the core team knows this. why is ember being pushed so hard? recently there were many articles on HN itself about how great ember is. if it's so great, why is it people get frustrated with the most simple tutorial? Why was the response 'i refuse to respond' instead of 'this is a known issue, we're working on it as fast as we can'?

ErikRogneby 14y ago

trek: "I definitely feel your frustration. The tone of this topic is not in line with the civil level of discourse I'd like to maintain here, so I cannot respond." Wow, could that response be any more passive aggressive?

re_todd 14y ago
Good point, and very thin-skinned. On the other hand, isn't this how many developers think and act? At least trek is being honest about it.
- ErikRogneby 14y ago
  many or most? I think of most developers as folks who are asked questions "is it possible to do X?" and can't help answering "yes, but..." of course it's possible. And would equally be embarrassed when their code doesn't live up to marketing spin. I also think any developer worth their salt is going to respond sheepish and apologetic when their code neither adheres to convention of the collective hacker zeitgeist or is documented sufficiently for someone reasonable to get it up and running quickly. Maybe we need a new acronym: SNAP! "Sensitive new age programmer"

thwest 14y ago

Shoutout to everyone on freenode's #emberjs that has helped me work through these troubles.

robotmay 14y ago

Does anyone know of a JS framework which plays nicely with Server Sent Events or WebSockets? I've tried pretty much everything so far, and it's always a colossal hack to implement, as none of them seem to have been built with anything other than CRUD in mind.

kaoD 14y ago
SocketStream which is built around RPC (at least it was like that on 0.3 which I tried) and Derby.js which is build around model-view binding. I used both a long time ago, not sure if they're still maintained.
- robotmay 14y ago
  Ah I quite like those two, but I was hoping for some client-side ones as most of my projects are in Ruby :) I should try a project on Node again at some point, it has been quite a while.
  - kaoD 14y ago
    It seems to me that this isn't feasible in pure client side because the server would have to agree on some kind of protocol. Server-side is mandatory here. Unfortunately I cannot recommend any since I don't do Ruby :( Maybe you don't need a framework but just a JSON-RPC[1] library. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-RPC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-RPC
    - robotmay 14y ago
      I'm really just looking for a model system that allows simple updates of objects in its identity map with data from an arbitrary source. Backbone is the closest I've found to supporting this with the least effort. I'd rather like to use Server Sent Events, as there's decent support in a variety of languages and it's pretty simple; it's just that no current frameworks seem to have been built with those sorts of technologies in mind. I've largely resigned myself to having to hack support into anything I try.

ryan_f 14y ago

Isn't all of this just blown out of proportion? Why not focus on how to help improve ember.js than one person's response? Even if that person contributes to the documentation and to the project. Get over it already.

kanja 14y ago
It's incredibly out of proportion - but people really want to use ember (because it promises all these great things!) and they're frustrated by the docs (because they're not really good for first time users) so this is kind of a flash point.

melc 14y ago

From personal experience in order to get started just checking out the documentation(i had started with the old documentation now called guides) should be fine. Some googling around might be needed but should not take much time. Generally i agree that it is a bit hard to get used to the framework, but if one has the ability to look in the console and figure out errors, should not really have any problems getting started with emberjs. Also just grabbing code from the first page, i don't think is a really good idea. Does this technique work with other popular frameworks like http://nodejs.org/ http://nodejs.org/ http://jquery.com/ http://jquery.com/ .... ?

desireco42 14y ago

Thank you for writing this. That is all I am going to say.

tibbon 14y ago

About nine months ago, I tried Ember. I'm not a huge javascript guy, but I'm pretty good in Rails and have written a handful of javascript things. But anyway, I just couldn't get the stuff to work. All the tutorials, walkthroughs, getting started guides, git repos.... just tons of cryptic errors, strange behavior and terrible documentation. It seemed cool. I really wanted to like it. But- I essentially got "the documentation is in the code" as an answer. I don't know why Javascript programmers can't be bothered to return meaningful errors that actually hint at fixing the problem, especially when they are super common errors that everyone hits (such as the Handlebars version thing that was mentioned here).

saintx 14y ago

It's a revealing commentary on the nature of the project and its developer community that this entire conversation seems to be about one dude. Suddenly, the "ember.js" brand collapses and becomes subsumed by the "trek" brand. All other factors aside, it doesn't sound like the sort of healthy, active project that I like to use.

laureny 14y ago

Regardless of the technical difference between Angular and Ember, I have to say that the Angular documentation is one of the best I have ever read for a software library. I'm not just talking about how it's written (it's English, it's technical, the bar is pretty low) but how they structured it to address exactly what the OP is complaining about: each code listing is shown in a multi-tab pages showing 1) the .html files 2) the .js files and 3) the .css files. The only thing that could make it even better would be a direct link to a jsfidle (externally or internally hosted) so I can try and tweak all these examples without having to write my own, but it's already excellent as it is. I hope more libraries follow this documentation model.

Vekz 14y ago

Beyond Ember.js this is a highly constructive approach to any API Library you are developing. Developers tend to disregard User Experience when building out tools for other developers. Put yourself in a first time users perspective like this and try to relate to that stream of consciousness.

doki_pen 14y ago

A decent screencast: http://toranbillups.com/blog/archive/2013/03/02/emberjs-rc1-introduction-screencast/ http://toranbillups.com/blog/archive/2013/03/02/emberjs-rc1-...

undoware 14y ago

I think that a lot of the kurfuffle viz. trek's response is a forum cultural shear. Trek's site is on Discourse, which has its own stricter rules of engagement that supercede those of the broader FOSS community. The rules on Discourse are moreover reasonable and well-advertised, even if you (or I) find them a touch stilted. It is trek's right and freedom to maintain whatever culture he sees fit on his site.

pixelhandler 14y ago

I would like to say "nothing is easy"; a mentor taught me that long ago. Also, when I read on the Ember home page that Ember is for building ambitious web applications, right a way I though I better read all the docs, the source code, and the tests to get to know what Ember does. Since nothing is easy I would say that the Ember community is totally aware of that and very helpful. I was very impressed by the guides and the api docs. Reading the Ember source and especially the tests has helped me to begin to understand how Ember works. For me getting started with Ember was not about completing a TODO app or just watching a tutorial video and then pounding out some code. But instead has been about studying existing applications like the Discourse application or the Travis app. I recently say I sweet Emberpress app much like the iOS app "Letterpress" and was amazed at how well the code just makes sense. Getting started with Ember takes ambition and IMHO is well worth the investment.

mgrassotti 14y ago

Since my old stackoverflow answer was referenced in this topic , i've updated it to include a MVP QuickStart Guide. Hopefully this helps delvarworld and others get started with ember. Feedback welcome :-) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14204674/how-to-architect-an-ember-js-application/14205734#14205734 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14204674/how-to-architect...

dysoco 14y ago

Well damn, that's what you get for choosing something new and Bleeding Edge. People expect a lot of documentations, tutorials, good community and comercial support for something that was released a couple months ago...

modarts 14y ago
The problem is the fact that the marketing copy on the site + the messaging by the contributors would lead one to assume that Ember is pretty well polished, stable and ready to build big things on top of -today-.

mark_l_watson 14y ago

I have some sympathy for the author of this comment. I have probably spent 25 hours trying to spin up on Ember.js in the last few weeks, concentrating both on Ember.js itself, and how to work with REST back ends written in Node.js and in Clojure (I have a few simple examples of this in public github repos). Yesterday I struggled getting simple auth working. I am taking it a bit on faith that this work will pay off, even though my usual development "use cases" are fairly simple web apps where I just use a little AJAX (often pjax). I am assuming that if I master Ember.js then I will build more complex stuff. I like Ember.js and Node.js - a light weight development kit. A few years ago I was doing GWT/SmartGWT for a customer: produces nice interactive web apps but development feels like running through mud.

FuzzyDunlop 14y ago

I think the OP in that thread wrote a pretty amazing post, in all honesty. Unlike your typical "it doesn't work" or "this sucks", the frustrated individual still takes care to detail, step by step, exactly what felt wrong or what was missing. In doing so, they demonstrate exactly why it's so frustrating. There's feedback not only on the quality of the documentation, but the experience of getting an Ember app up and running. While improving the former would make life a bit simpler, the setup seemingly being so involved - requiring you to manually resolve missing dependencies - still diminishes the initial experience. All of this makes it surprising that someone would totally dismiss it in such an unceremonious manner, and for reasons that are totally at conflict with what doubles up as a support forum. Is that discussion board there as a flagship Discourse site, or for support?

zaius 14y ago

I've had a lot of trouble with learning ember while dealing with all the breaking changes as it's moved towards 1.0. The ember core team have said they're updating docs, and trying to get outdated tutorials marked as such, but until that time it's still a bit of a minefield. So, if you'd like to chat about ember with other people learning, and not just have a channel full of unanswered questions (i.e. #emberjs), come join me on freenode at #emberjs-chat

gbadman 14y ago

For those who are finding it difficult to get a hello world up and running, see: http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:5206526?p=preview http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:5206526?p=preview

DelvarWorld 14y ago

haha hey I wrote this reply on their forum. I had no idea it topped out HN. sucks that they froze it. wanna give this comment upvotes so my karma goes above 0? my intention was never to cause a shit storm. I just banged out a thread on their forum and fell asleep. I just wanted an ember quick start tutorial. and I eventually got linked to one. i'm still going to try out ember later with it. it's poopy that the thread got froze with so many people having the same problem. i had no idea it was such a major pain point for the library. my only advice would be that sarcastic tones are usually the most helpful, if they're not insulting.

ebryn 14y ago

FYI, Rob Conery just posted a great post that addresses the exact issues the OP had: http://wekeroad.com/2013/03/20/ember-baby-steps http://wekeroad.com/2013/03/20/ember-baby-steps

ef4 14y ago

I'm going to offer some unsolicited advice. The constructive way to deal with a project that you find interesting but undocumented or otherwise unpolished is to attack. Attack the bugs one by one as you hit them. Go straight to the source and read, read, read. Ain't nobody got time for that? Ah, but grasshopper, it seems hugely difficult to you because you lack practice. If you get in the habit of attacking code like this, you will get faster and faster at it. And then the next time a project comes along that's cool, bleeding-edge, and undocumented, you'll just pick it up and be working in no time. Reading is the secret weapon that turns a mediocre programmer into a great programmer. You need to read a lot of other people's source code. And a situation like the one in this post is ideal: you have a specific problem you're trying to solve, and you have access to all the relevant source code. If you really don't have time because you need to ship yesterday, then why are you trying to use pre-1.0 software? Go use something boring and proven.

polshaw 14y ago
Why not put that effort into learning JS instead of fixing someone else's JS framework?
- ef4 14y ago
  Your question implies that frameworks are only for people who don't know Javascript. You might want to reconsider that.

jam_tmrw 14y ago

Love ember!!!

regularfry 14y ago

This sounds... familiar. Precisely this sort of experience with Ember led me to write a Getting Started tutorial: https://github.com/regularfry/website/blob/master/source/guides/getting-started/your-first-ember-app.md https://github.com/regularfry/website/blob/master/source/gui...

gcao 14y ago

With my due respect to guys behind Ember, I don't understand why Ember gets so much attention. It has been in works for 4~5 years now but has not reached its 1.0 status. I've seen many complaints about its learning curve, documentation etc. However, when people talk about Javascript web frameworks to learn, it is often brought up as a candidate. Maybe someone can tell me why people think it will be a serious contender in this fast moving area.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

readme 14y ago

This is a good example of a bad attitude. This person was someone who had the skills to plow through the frustrations and could have made a contribution by writing that missing tutorial, but instead chose to gripe.

jcolemorr11 14y ago

Died laughing when I saw this title because it's exactly what I thought about Ember. For speed of development I kept flirting with Ember because of the "positives" I've heard. The oddities of its ecosystem and the rather disgruntled/angered contributors backlash towards negative feedback has really cast a negative shadow on it.