Is Ember Floundering?

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I convinced my [small] team of developers to use Ember for a year long project we started in March. Functionally speaking, things have been pretty good. We’ve found Ember to fit our needs well. All of the energy toward Ember 2.0 and web components was a big tipping point for us. We started with with 1.12 and are now on 2.1. We are trying to practice 2.0 patterns using services and components. We only have 4 controllers left, all of which are for query params.

That said, I’m starting to worry that the energy around Ember 2.0 is gone and we may but stuck in this limbo state past the life of the project :(. Ember 2.0 was originally slated for June and was expected to be fully complete based on the Ember 2.x RFC and have engines. We’ve all worked in software for a while, and completely understand slippage. But now it’s November and I’m really beginning to grow concerned by several things.

  • Routable Components are completely MIA.
  • Some very serious bugs seem to receive little attention.
  • Many RFCs, even small and simple ones, seem to dwindle.
  • Ember-CLI doesn’t even seem to support Ember 2.0 (v1.13.8 listed on the site).
  • Docs are dated and seem to miss. Even the 1.x deprecations page isn’t complete.
  • No public roadmap or guidance on what the future looks like.
  • Hard to help. I see people try to jump in and help in small ways, but seem to be unable to get traction.
  • Would like to see progress on Engines … but is not really a concern for my project.

I know that probably sounds negative. Maybe, hopefully, I’m wrong about many of these things. But right now, I’m starting to second guess my choice to push for Ember. Don’t get me wrong, the tech has been great and we’ve had only minor issues thus far. It just feels like we’re stuck in this incomplete and limbo state without some key features and no real good line of sight on their timing. Is there any info on what to expect and when to expect it?

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Short answer: no, it doesn’t seem like it’s floundering, it’s just taking a bit to land the next big pieces. More details here:

As far as the pace goes, if you joined us in March, that was an unusually busy time as the core team was really cranking to hit their deadline. But that rate of change doesn’t seem sustainable for the core team (or the community), so I’m glad to see things slow down a bit. I’ve been helping with docs and the docs team got buried :slight_smile: Probably good to ease up a bit while things shake down a bit …

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Frankly speaking, I am glad things slow down as well. Don’t hear my wrong, I am really looking forward to angle bracket components and routeable components. But that’s the point: now I’m looking forward to stuff, while a few months ago I was catching up stuff.

I value well thought-out design over an explosion of thrown-together features. Brings some sanity and stability to the JS world. And Ember team is really good at that.

I do agree with the lack of documentation, be it about the code (that one is being addressed I believe - right now I still rtfs more often than I rtfm) or about the project itself. Ember blog and rfc base are good starting points, but from the outside it seems core developers know each other well and a lot happens off the grid.

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