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lookingsideways | 7 years ago

I'm probably biased as I work on the admin interface day-to-day but technology-wise it's been great.

Upgrades are painless, typically requiring around an hour at most. If there are bigger framework changes we can usually upgrade immediately then clean up deprecations later as necessary but even then the work is normally minimal. When there are more stylistic changes that touch many files it's usually very quick work thanks to the codemods that are released alongside. All of this despite huge and continuous under-the-hood improvements in Ember since we've been using it.

Compared to what I've seen in other frameworks I think we've benefitted a lot in being able to spend pretty much zero time bike shedding which libraries will make up our core framework. We also save a lot of time not needing to upgrade disparate parts of a custom framework built of 3rd party libraries that aren't necessarily in sync with each other. The Ember addon ecosystem has also been stellar, with common solutions rallied around by the community such that they are usually as stable as core and kept up-to-date with the latest idioms without breaking backwards compatibility.

In conclusion Ember has allowed us to focus almost entirely on product rather than framework. It stays out of the way and provides very clear happy paths for typical workflows whilst allowing us to break out of those where needed without sacrificing any tooling or upgradability.

As for the downsides I think the biggest has been the limited pool of contributors. A lot of react bandwagon jumping has happened since we started with Ember and it's interesting when talking to other developers outside of the Ember ecosystem because there's a lot of historical and outdated views about what Ember is and isn't. The Ember core team and community is working hard to improve Ember's marketing message to counter that but it's tough to break through when the framework's core selling point is consistency through hype cycles.

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Mc_Big_G|7 years ago

I'd wager almost everyone who has used ember in production feels much the same way. Ember is basically the best js framework for most use cases but React won the marketing war and has the backing of FB, so Ember just got crushed. It's sad because I love using Ember but the limitation on opportunities is a career killer. At this point it's embrace React or die. I see companies moving to React simply because they can't hire for Ember, not because React is better in any way.