Ember.js: The Perfect Framework for Web Applications

Ember.js is a modern front-end JavaScript framework that focuses on conventions and over configurations, and has attracted much attention recently. This article will introduce the key concepts of the framework and its implementation capabilities by constructing a simple dice roll application.

Our sample application is a dice roll program that allows users to roll dice and view history. The full code for the app is available on Github.

Ember.js integrates many modern JavaScript concepts and technologies, including but not limited to:

• Support ES2016 using the Babel translator.
• Standard unit, integration and acceptance testing support, powered by Testem and QTest.
• Build resources using Broccoli.js.
• Support real-time reloading and shorten development cycle.
• Use Handlebars template syntax.
• URL routing is preferred to ensure full support for deep links.
• Build a complete data layer based on the JSON API, but other API access methods can be inserted as needed.

To use Ember.js, you need to install the latest versions of Node.js and npm. If not, you can download and install it from the official website of Node.js.

To be noted, Ember.js is purely a front-end framework. It has multiple ways to interact with the backend of your choice, but the backend itself is not handled by Ember.js.

Key Points

• Ember.js is a comprehensive front-end JavaScript framework that integrates modern JavaScript features and tools into a single, consistent package, ideal for building web applications.
• This framework is based on the principle of "convention over configuration" and simplifies the development process by providing reasonable defaults and best practices, thereby speeding up the development cycle and reducing setup time.
• Ember-cli (Ember's command line interface) is a powerful tool that manages the entire development lifecycle from project creation and development to testing and deployment, thereby increasing productivity and efficiency.
• Ember.js natively supports powerful URL routing and deep linking, ensuring applications are SEO-friendly and maintaining maintainability with a clear navigation structure.
• The framework contains a built-in data layer for managing data interactions between clients and servers. It supports JSON API by default, but allows customization to suit different backend APIs.
• Test is the first class citizen in Ember.js, which supports unit testing, integration testing and acceptance testing, powered by tools such as Testem and QTest, which helps ensure the reliability and quality of your application.
• Ember.js uses components and templates to simplify the development of reusable and maintainable user interface elements, facilitating best practices in web application design and architecture.

Introduction ember-cli

Ember.js' power comes from its command line interface (CLI). This tool—called ember-cli—drives most of the development lifecycle of Ember.js applications, from creating applications, adding features, to running test suites and launching actual projects in development mode.

When developing an Ember.js application, almost everything will involve this tool to some extent, so it is important to understand how to best use it. We will use it in this article.

First of all, we need to make sure that the Ember.js CLI is installed correctly and updated. This can be done by installing from npm as follows:

$ npm install -g ember-cli

We can check if it has been installed successfully by running the following command:

$ ember --version
ember-cli: 2.15.0-beta.1
node: 8.2.1
os: darwin x64

Create your first Ember.js app

After installing ember-cli, you can start creating applications. This is where we will use the Ember.js CLI tool for the first time – it creates the entire application structure, sets everything up for it to run.

$ ember new dice-roller
... (安装过程输出) ...

This will create a complete application that can be run immediately. It even sets up Git as source control to track your work.

Note: You can disable Git integration if you want, or you can choose to use Yarn instead of npm. This and more are described in the tool's help documentation.

Now, let's see what it looks like. Use ember-cli to start the Ember application for development:

$ npm install -g ember-cli

Now we are ready. The application is running on https://www.php.cn/link/988aaaa9bd19c1e0f8043a132bbf1af3 as follows:

It also runs a LiveReload service that automatically monitors file system changes. This means that you can have very fast turnaround times when tweaking your website design.

Let's try it?

The initial page already tells us what to do, so let's change the main page and see what happens. We will change the app/templates/application.hbs file to look like this:

$ ember --version
ember-cli: 2.15.0-beta.1
node: 8.2.1
os: darwin x64

Note: The {{outlet}} tag is part of how Ember routing works. We'll cover it later.

The first thing to note is the output of ember-cli, which should look like this:

$ ember new dice-roller
... (安装过程输出) ...

This tells us it has found that we have changed the template and rebuilt and restarted everything. We have no participation in this part of the content.

Let's look at the browser now. If you have LiveReload installed and run, you don't even need to refresh your browser to pick it up, otherwise you need to reload the current page.

While it wasn't very interesting, we achieved this without putting any effort.

In addition, we also got a fully set test suite that works. As expected, this is also run using the Ember tool:

$ cd dice-roller
$ ember serve
... (启动过程输出) ...

Note that PhantomJS is mentioned in the output. This is because integration tests running in the browser are fully supported, which by default run headless in the PhantomJS browser. If you prefer, you can fully support running them in other browsers, and when setting up Continuous Integration (CI), it is worth doing so to ensure your application works properly in all supported browsers.

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