It seems as though EmberJS does not handle issues with missing data very well. Tom Dale’s demos show that when data access fails, routes fail, and nothing, not even the basic HTML layout is displayed in the Browser. The framework should at least display the application with placeholders (blank state) for data elements on the page that the application couldn’t read from the server.
How do you handle errors gracefully, when your back-end data fails?
How would you propose they show your template? Fill the entire page with empty fields? This becomes even harder when you’ve got javascript in computed properties/routes/views that depends on that data. You then start crash all over the runloop. It makes more sense for you to create an error view and transition to that upon ajax failure, or popup some sort of error modal, or whatever makes sense per the situation.
I definitely agree with @kingpin2k that there’s no good default for this. The behavior you want is going to be very app specific.