Should I use ember data with ember.js?

Question

In the project I am working on, we are using ember.js (1.0rc1) without ember-data which is working out quite fine so far. The reason why we decided to go without ember-data is that we already have some utility methods to handle the integration with the REST interface, and over all because ember-data is not part of the ember.js.

From emberjs.com:

Currently, Ember Data ships as a separate library from Ember.js, while we expand the adapter API to support more features. The API described in this section tends to be stable, however. Until Ember Data is included as part of the standard distribution, you can get your copy from the GitHub page.

So, to my questions and the input I am looking for:

• how much do we lose/gain with this approach? (besides the REST integration)
• experiences of somebody that actually might have started also without ember-data, and now migrated to ember-data
• maturity of ember-data and its integration into ember.js

And there is another question, which might rather be for the ember.js/ember-data devs:

• what's the roadmap to integrate ember-data into ember.js and how strong will be the impact on the APIs?

Thanks for sharing your experiences and giving some hints and advices. // ph

Answer 1

I use ember-data in my project and I'm very pleased with it. I saves you a lot of time developing your own stuff for communicating with the server.

At this time ember-data is not officially production-ready but I use it already.

Read this on the emberjs website about ember-data. It says:

Without any configuration, Ember Data can load and save records and relationships served via a RESTful JSON API, provided it follows certain conventions.

We also understand that there exist many web service APIs in the world, many of them crazy, inconsistent, and out of your control. Ember Data is designed to be configurable to work with whatever persistence layer you want, from the ordinary to the exotic.

There is more information on the github page. There is even kind of a roadmap in it...

Another advantage is that you can define your Models with their relationships. It's also possible to use transactions which are giving you the ability to rollback changes if something went wrong at the server.

I really like the vision behind ember-data that it's not dependent on the kind of backend you use. Or where you define your relationships. If you use Mongo-db where you define the relationships on the parent object, where others do that the childs.