I’m not terribly enthusiastic about view templating languages (HTMLbars, Handlebars, etc). Should I steer clear of Ember.js? Or is the templating a non-required part of Ember.js?
My preference is for replacing view text via html elements: id, class, and tags. Projects for this pattern are:
ember is for building single page applications, with optional server-side rendering.
weld looks like it wants to be jQuery for server side rendering, except it needs jsdom. If it’s already using jsdom, why not just use jQuery? I don’t see the purpose of this new invention.
Plates and Weld seek to replace having to pepper HTML views with templating syntax, like {{}} <?=?>. It is meant to replace templating systems like handlebars and htmlbars.
It isn’t meant as a replacement for jQuery. It also works just fine in browser as well as serverside.
From what I see, Plates and Weld is just another flavor of template engine. But instead of using special syntax to bind values, they choose to use identifiers already present in HTML: #id and .class.
But that’s off topic.
Ember is a very opinionated framework, so doing anything that not the ember way will bring a lot of pain. If templating is a deal breaker for you, then definitely you should steer clear of ember. Otherwise, you should definitely consider ember for your project. One advantage of an opinionated framework is that it reduces a lot of decision fatigue. You no longer need to spend hours making design decisions because these decisions are already made for you. In case you need specific integration into particular library, there are tons of add-ons you can use built by people who know ember best.
Well that’s a bummer.