Ember is built to work with Ember Data out of the box, but it's trivial to make your own methods that fit with the conventions. I assume you're referring to the default `find` support in the router. All that Ember does is attempt to infer a class name and call `find(id)` on it if the `find` method exists. You can implement this method however you want, or even change your routes to call an entirely different method.

I also highly recommend watching one of the follow talks about Ember Data: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6yMxU-_ARs or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8nnE948zxk. Both talks make it very clear that Ember Data is not at all comparable to what is offerred by other frameworks.