What is the status of Ember-Data? Last beta release was 3 months ago. Last commit to Single source of truth branch was done over month ago. Ember-Data is a great library and I appreciate all hard work that has been put into developing this, but it’s very hard to work with library that has so many problems and unknown future. Is there any hope that Ember-Data will get production ready? Any estimates at all for that? I understand that getting all relationships, polymorphism etc working together is hard, but maybe we could have some version that doesn’t contain these features and just works?
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One would think so based on the lack of news since Ember Conf. There was a Blog post about it a couple months ago. The fact is, there are several big features that have seemingly stalled; HTMLBars, Query Params, etc. My guess is that the main contributors are just burnt out at the moment or there is development still going on that is not available to the public eye. Who knows…
I don’t believe any of those components are dead. To @Panman8201’s point, the development seems public as the GitHub commits are coming in regularly and are publicly viewable. There may not be blog or email updates, but stuff appears to be rolling.
Here’s the commit history for HTMLBars with commits coming in regularly up until three days ago: https://github.com/tildeio/htmlbars/commits/master
Here’s the commit history for Ember Data, with commits coming in regularly up until two days ago: https://github.com/emberjs/data/commits/master
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I doubt very much that it is dead. Probably just delayed as suggested by @Panman8201. There’s a new podcast discussing it with Igor Terzic here: http://emberhotseat.com/2014/05/04/ember-hot-seat-episode-016.html. The podcast is almost a week old but was probably recorded more like in April.
Ember-Data does not seem to be completely dead. It has actually some nice changes that were merged a few days ago. However, the more I use Ember Data and EmberJS, the more I feel Ember Data is really wrong and has the wrong abstractions in a lot of places. On the other hand, EmberJS seems to be better and better. It’s an amazing piece of work and each release brings new features and abstractions that just seems right, and thought very carefully (query params I’m thinking about you :D).
On the other hand, I really feel like Ember-Data lacks a bit of direction, and maybe the fact that it seems dead is because we can’t see commits from the awesome @tomdale and @wycats :D. All the various additions that were made lately to Ember-Data (active model, embedded supports…) always feel strange to use and completely unnatural.
A lot of “advanced” features have been added (polymorphic types, async support through links…) while the very basic things (nested URL which is common in 99% of API, transparent embedded support, embeddable objects, forks objects) are lacking, which make it a very frustrating lib to use.
Maybe Ember-Data would need (another) complete rewrite, with new thoughts about the way it should work and used.
But I really hope it’s not dead, because a thing like Ember-Data is definitely absolutely needed! 
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I read somewhere that there was talk about building ember-data on top of https://github.com/orbitjs/orbit.js/ (which looks fantastic!). It looks like a great foundation for an ember persistence layer so hopefully ember-data will head in that direction or maybe some other project will emerge…
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Ember Data is definitely not dead. We use it every day on Skylight and it’s been solid for us; in fact, being busy launching that product is a big part of the reason our day-to-day involvement with development has slowed over the past few months.
We’re definitely still excited about Ember Data and think it’s as important as ever. @terzicigor will be continuing his awesome work on SSOT, and I’m hopeful that we can get a 1.0 out the door sooner rather than later.
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It is definitely not dead. In fact I quit my job last week to do part time consulting in order to have a lot more free time to focus on open source/Ember Data. If you look at the commits, they are coming steadily, last week with @pixelhandler’s help we merged a much better embedded support. This week I am working with @amiel and @rwjblue on how to refactor buildUrl to provide nicer support for nested urls, and starting a project with @ryanflorence to make metadata support work really well. SSOT has been stuck for the half month or so, partially because of time constraints, but again, yesterday was my last day at my former day job, so I should have much more time to focus on ED/SSOT.
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Great that you talk about. Just starting using it in our project and really we like a lot. We saw this post and got worry. So now is Clear. Keep Going!!
Thank you for great answers. As I can see there is light at the end of tunnel. I really appreciate all the hard work that you guys have put into this project. I’m building POS system for restaurants on top of Ember and Ember-Data. When I started it a year ago I took the risk to use these early stage technologies hoping that they will be production ready by the time of launch. The decision to use Ember has definitely paid off. It’s solid framework that really helps to increase productivity and reduce complexity. I’m hoping that some day I can say same about Ember-Data. Currently I have live clients and lot of problems. Many of day are Ember-Data related. As soon as I fix one problem (usually some hack as there is no official way to fix it) then it suddenly breaks at some other place. I often find myself thinking that I should abandon Ember-Data completely. So any transparency about progress of the framework is very welcome. Based on current information I will stay on Ember-Data and hope that it will get production ready soon:)
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Thank you @terzicigor for all your work on ED! Glad we have minds like yours on this problem space.
I have had the same thought and also recent frustration with Ember Data. @terzicigor glad to hear that you are able to tackle the problem. Looking forward to the outcome.
Speaking personally, I think the frustration is getting a good layman’s guide of what works and what doesn’t work in ED. There are a handful of rough edges that can be problematic for the uninitiated.
I think what would really help is if a more prominent guide was created with clear code examples and explanation. Also, document the things that currently don’t work and explain why, and/or when they might work with whatever roadmap you would be willing to commit to. This would be immensely helpful in avoiding the darker corners. Anyway, looking forward to the single source of truth work.
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