Want to learn Ember - concerned about native mobile apps

Learning Team
1

I just spent half an hour on the Quickstart of Ember. It felt very similar to Rails, and I’m not complaining at all. I actually found it quite pleasing after trudging through Angular 2 RC4 just a couple of weeks ago. Granted, I have barely scratched the surface of Ember whereas the Angular Tour of Heroes was quite detailed.

One of the things I’m really excited about with Angular 2 is both NativeScript and React Native. I can use the two renderers to deliver a performant mobile app without necessarily starting from scratch.

I tried to find out what the ‘Ionic-Cordova’ equivalent would be in Ember, but it seems it’s just that - Cordova/PhoneGap… which uses a WebView. I am considering where the future of Ember lies given nothing (in my past hour of reading, at least) seems to come close to what React Native and NativeScript promise for React and Angular 2, although in particular, Angular 2.

My question is: is there anything that I can use with an Ember app that would give me native apps on iOS and Android (especially Material Design – which Angular 2 will naturally have a library for)? I’m not itchy about one-codebase-to-serve-all; I’m infact quite happy with learn-once-write-everywhere.

2 Likes
2

There is ember-cli-cordova. Not sure how good it is, but it’s been around for a while.

I think the general direction for Ember, though, is bona fide web apps using things like service workers.

3

…which uses WebView. Poorer performance and doesn’t look & feel native. Angular 2 w/ NativeScript and React w/ React Native are solving that problem. Is Ember going to? This is a huge factor in me and possibly others deciding whether or not to learn Ember.

Sounds fair enough. I however feel it is kind of a pain to learn something that requires so much time but has only a limited application as a tool. Hardly the best cost-benefit.

4

Everything I’ve seen from the community points to a better mobile web app experience ("PWA"s as Google and others call it). If native mobile apps are your requirement, I would look elsewhere.

5

The short answer is no. Ember.js is focused on leveraging and improving web technologies.

The tools for taking Ember.js, specifically HTMLBars/Glimmer, and rendering onto a native context are getting into a point where some enterprising community member can pick it up and develop it, but it’ll have to come from the community, not core.