andyMatthews.net
Rewriting Backbone.js wineshop demo using Ember.js
Adobe evangelist Christophe Coenraets has been spending time learning Backbone.js for the past few months. He's written quite a few articles about using it to build a REST service, using Backbone with Phonegap, as well as using Backbone with jQuery Mobile. I've been going through a similar process, but with Ember.js instead. I thought I'd take his initial article and rewrite it using Ember. I looked at it as a way to get more comfortable with Ember, but also as a challenge to really see how these two libraries stack up.
I'm not going in depth with the Ember code because it's fairly simple. Here's a link to Christophe's original article and here's my example app written in Ember. I made a few small changes for ease of implementation. Christophe uses PHP to retrieve a JSON packet while I'm just storing the packet locally. Another change was that Christophe changes the URL. I'm not doing that, but it could be done with Ember.
The differences in code are significant. Christophe's version uses Backbone.js and underscore.js (a requirement of Backbone), and his main app.js file had 60 lines of code. My version uses CDN jQuery and Ember.js and my main app.js file has only 30 lines of code. Admittedly I don't have a router like he doesn't but the coordination between the views and controllers in Ember is so easy that less code is a given. You can download my code for Ember Wineshop if you like.
I'd love to get your comments on how I did with the conversion. Are there things that could be done better, more efficiently? Did I do anything wrong?