This Week in Ember.js

Nov 2, 2012 – By Tom Dale

There's a lot of work happening on Ember.js and sometimes it's hard to keep track of what's going on. Here's what me and Yehuda got done this week.

Meetup

The SF Ember.js Meetup on Tuesday (which we actually held in Mountain View this month) was a success! It was sponsored by our friends at Addepar, who are also funding me and Yehuda to work on Ember Data for the next few months. So, big thanks to them!

Tony Sherbondy gave an overview of the Addepar app and described how Ember.js has helped them. The biggest "a-ha" moment for me was when he described how they completely changed out the table view that powers big chunks of the UI, and didn't have to make any changes in the rest of the app. It's exactly this type of encapsulation that makes Ember a win, and I'm glad to see it happening in real life.

I gave a talk on Ember Data, and discussed some of the new APIs we'll be working on over the next few months. Yehuda gave a talk about the router proposal. The pork belly buns from the Chairman Bao food truck were epic. I got a little drunk.

Per-Type Adapters

You can now register different adapters on the store per-type. You can read more about this feature in this Gist.

This feature is done and on master!

Explicit Inverses

Ember Data has always been smart enough to know that when you set a belongsTo relationship, the child record should be added to the parent's corresponding hasMany relationship.

Unfortunately, it was pretty braindead about which hasMany relationship it would update. Before, it would pick the first relationship it found with the same type as the child.

Because it's reasonable for people to have multiple belongsTo/hasManys for the same type, we added support for specifying an inverse:

App.Comment = DS.Model.extend({
  onePost: DS.belongsTo("App.Post"),
  twoPost: DS.belongsTo("App.Post"),
  redPost: DS.belongsTo("App.Post"),
  bluePost: DS.belongsTo("App.Post")
});


App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
  comments: DS.hasMany('App.Comment', {
    inverse: 'redPost'
  })
});

You can also specify an inverse on a belongsTo, which works how you'd expect.

Mappable Refactor

We noticed that a lot of configuration APIs we were introducing in the adapter layer wanted to treat the adapter or serializer object like a map, but there were some slightly different semantics than the standard Ember.Map implementation.

This refactor greatly cleans up the implementation and increases the amount of code shared between classes.

It's a little hard to explain, but hopefully the inline documentation plus the actual usage in the framework should make it clear what I mean.

Unfortunately I totally spaced and forgot to push this, and it's on a computer I don't have access to at the moment. Look for this in a few weeks!

Core Concepts Guide

Many people getting started with Ember.js tell me that each of the individual pieces make sense, but they're not sure how all of those pieces fit together.

We're making a big push towards improving our documentation as we head towards the 1.0 release, and this is one of the first things I want to address.

To that end, I wrote a "Core Concepts" guide that I hope you will find helpful. It's not up yet (I'm still working on a branch of the website) but you can view the Markdown on GitHub.

We want to make Ember.js as easy for new developers to pick up as possible, so your feedback about our documentation, as always, is extremely important. Please review and let me know what you think!

Finally, I'd like to give a shoutout to Trek Glowacki for doing an awesome job repping the Ember.js community on the JS Jabber podcast. If you haven't listened yet, it's worth your time.

Me, Yehuda and the rest of the Tilde team will be in Hawaii next week for our company offsite. We should have wi-fi and be generally available, but we have plenty of luaus, boat cruises, and zip line adventures planned, so if we're less available than usual, that's the reason.

That's it for this week,
Tom Dale
@tomdale