Are developers creating Ember apps outside the context of Rails?

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It seems like most of the apps created today are built on top of Rails. Are there any examples of Ember apps working independently of Rails?

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Examples? There is a PHP implementation using the YII framework here: https://github.com/drumaddict/ember-yii

Personally I am using it in combination with some Symfony2 (PHP) dev, in addition to some Rails. The only really issues I have had with non-Rails integrations are:

  • You need to build as one file, or use something to combine your JS for you. I use Assetic in Symfony2 on the PHP side.
  • If you use ember-data, you have to know the format for the JSON strings VERY well. By default Ember-data uses the Rails conventions for JSON strings, but these conventions apply only to Rails. Every project that outputs JSON does it differently.

Unfortunately I can’t show you any of my code. Sorry.

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the company I work for, the product is an emberjs single page app that hits a json service implemented in python/pyramid on google appengine. So… at least one that I know of. It’s proprietary though so I can’t show code for obvious reasons.

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Have a mobile app that hits a python turbogears stack (customized JSON REST API). And another smaller app that is on a node.js stack with express.

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I’m working on something, not published yet, with .NET Web API as backend

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Absolutely. I am fumbling around with a Flask (python) backend. Learning Ember was a weekend project that has now spilled over to Monday.

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I’m using Ember (+data) in TYPO3 Flow (PHP). I do have similar issues as awildeep where mostly the rest api challenges us from time to time… We still have some glitches in the implementation, but the code will be publicly available when we’re done.

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Here at Canvas we’re building a couple different projects using Ember.js, some with Rails, some with Rails as an API endpoint, and others with random endpoints of various technical implementation. (And by some, I mean one for each of those.) The biggest app we’re building is a PhoneGap wrapped iPhone app for Grand Central Terminal in NYC. We’ll be launching soon and then talking about how we built it online and hopefully in public, too!

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We’re using Ember and Ember-data with PHP (Codeigniter backend)

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We at Boinx Software are looking into Ember.js with a node.js/mongodb backand. We had our problems with the Rails JSON/REST conventions at first (I think there should be better documentation on the RESTAdapter’s expected return values) but once we found out how it works, it’s really easy (and has nice features like streaming new database entries over websockets etc.)

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Why would you need to build as one file?

@jergason makes sense now! :slight_smile:

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I think he just means that you don’t have the Rails asset pipeline to build your files for you.

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At work we had a single Ember.js application as the UI backed by five differente services. One Ruby (not Rails), one C, and three Java. We developed the UI entirely in isolation from the services, proxying to them via a node-based grunt task in development and nginx in production.

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Exactly. While we don’t have pipeline in PHP, we do have Assetic which performs the same role. Just a lot of PHP devs know nothing about it. Also other languages have no equivalent (yet) so this may aid them.

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I’m working on something as well, Rails as an API backend that only spits JSON out (using rails-api gem), with a frontend built using rake-pipeline which compiles everything and serves it as a rack app (just ruby, no rails at all), the only issue I had was figuring out how to consume the API endpoints with the cross-origin policy being in effect in most modern browsers, rack-cors to the rescue: https://github.com/cyu/rack-cors.

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I would love to see how you’re building this API. Are you integrating with Ember Data? I am also using .Net and about to embark on a Ember project.

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I’m using EmberJS to develop a mobile app wrapped in PhoneGap. So far so good!

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I’ve spent the last few months building ember.js apps on top of django and the django-rest-framework.

I’ve found that if you want a pure ember.js and django ecosystem (w/out any ruby or rake pipeline in the mix) you can get away with using the django-compressor to do your JS build step. This build tool also has a hook that lets you shell out to npm for

  1. coffee script compilation (npm install coffee-script)
  2. handlebars template pre-compilation (npm install django-ember-precompile)
  3. less (npm install less)

From here you have the option to compress the js down (production situation) or leave each file as is (to help debug locally for example)

The only real issues I’ve found is that minispade (if you are using it instead of requireJS) would require yet another npm module of some type (thou I’m not sure what this would look like as I’ve never used minispade)

Also since django 1.5 was released you can now mix django and ember templates using the {% verbatim %} tag out of the box (no extra stuff required)

I ended up writing a custom ember-data adapter for my REST backend (as it’s django specific)

So far I’ve had great success with ember.js + ember-data on top of django

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Yeah, I’m using the .NET Web API. I’ve just pushed to GitHub: https://github.com/MilkyWayJoe/Ember-Contact-Management-WebAPI

It’s still “under construction” tho

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@toranb Thanks for making a screencast that focuses on Ember and not the backend software so much. It is also good to see a Python backend, but the focus on Ember is what I really like from this cast.