Use Ember for image sharing site

1

Hi

I’m about to start a new site where you can upload and share images. Kind of like 500px.com

I will use Rails 4 but haven’t decided if I should use Ember or not… Is it appropriate to use Ember for a site like this? Is it easy to manage file uploads to S3 with Ember or will I have to jump through hoops to get it to work properly?

2

Ember does not make it any harder nor any easier to upload files to S3, so the question you should ask in that regard should be rather “Is it easy to manage file uploads to S3 with Javascript”. Ember seems like a good tool for such site for 2 reasons:

  • it’s built with URL support in mind, you need to do quite some work to not use URLs. I think this will be quite important for 500px like site, because when you browse through the photos, you want your back button working correctly and you want to be able to link to any of the photos
  • it seems to me that content on such site will be highly cache’able, ie. it won’t change that much between different visits. Sure, you may implement “like” functionality, comments and other interactive parts, but it’s often the case that most people view the content rather than to create it. This means that it may be easier to make it work fast

There are probably other good reasons to use Ember, you should do your own research and compare it to alternatives anyway.

The one thing that may be harder in your case is SEO. While you can serve static version of your pages (you may check how discourse works in that regard by disabling javascript), it’s obviously adding up to things you need to handle. That said, this is a problem with all of the JS frameworks out there, it’s not exclusive to Ember.js

3

I have added uploads to my ember app via jQuery-File-Upload and Rails 3X. I upload directly upload directly to S3 then save reference to image url on server and also then generate thumbnails via Blitline service. All works pretty we wi think.

Let me know if i can help.