Nik Wakelin talks about why he chose Ember.js for his startup, gelato.io, a tool for getting awesome API documentation to attract the attentions of more developers. This talk, at March’s incarnation of Ember London Meetup is a reference to Wakelin’s journey all the way from New Zealand to London which comprised a huge segment by train from Shanghai to London.
Wakelin knew that he wanted a dynamic responsive UI for Gelato but that he had to use a framework that was exactly as Ember is described in being ‘more productive and out of the box’. Perfect for a small start-up with limited funding especially since Ember also has an active contributing community.
At first Wakelin did what most Rails Developers would do which is to find a gem to get him where he needed to go but he found ember-rails to be ‘rickety’ with deploy problems and a lack of standardisation. That is until he started to use Ember CLI, “suddenly, everything made sense, everything had a place. I had my bearings, I had my testing baked in, I even had an Ember command and this is brilliant coming from Rails because I was used to having that Rails command to do everything for me.”
This talk also explores translation difficulties and although Rails will output JSON that Ember can understand using Active Model Serialisers, Wakelin also talks about jBuilder for declaring structures. On top of this Wakelin also talks about testing with Ember CLI where each unit is isolated and the challenges he overcame until the release of QUnit v.0.2.11.
