Ask HN: Why isn't Ember popular? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why isn't Ember popular?

19 pointsmvlandys7 comments

Compared to Angular, people that use Ember are a rarity... https://i.imgur.com/4CEeJMv.png

I have used Ember on previous projects and love it. Whats the reason for Angular being so popular?

The first two answers to this quora question are from authors of each framework and give very detailed responses, I encourage you to give it a read to gain technical insight on the differences, as it will help give perspective on why Angular is more popular: http://www.quora.com/Client-side-MVC/Is-Angular-js-or-Ember-...

My personal opinion on why Angular is more popular than Ember goes back to the root difference between the two frameworks: Ember's syntax is structured in a way that favors those coming from Cocoa or Ruby, while Angular is structured in a way more familiar to those with an existing background in HTML5. I also wouldn't discredit the proximity Google already has with web developers (analytics, webmaster tools, etc).

Probably two very large factors have to do with Google being the force behind angular, and the fact that you can inject it into existing pages. Whereas with ember, you more or less need to build from scratch with ember.

Personally, I prefer ember myself. I find angular very awkward and slow. I agree with you, ember doesn't get the respect it deserves.

I tried Ember a few years ago, 2 things, I didn't like:

- the api was changing all the time, so Ember would break often

- Ember wasn't "opt-in", like React or AngularJS. You don't need to write SPAs with either Angular or React, in fact Angular doesn't even ship with a router by default anymore. Which is good.

I just thought that, at the time, while Angular knew where it was heading, Ember just didn't. Finally Angular seemed more pragmatic to me in term of integration with legacy jQuery widgets and stuff like that.

If all you care about are Google Trends, why isn't Angular popular? According to the trends, everyone's still writing jQuery [1].

ember-cli has counted 203986 downloads in the last week [2]. I'd say that's not bad. Maybe even pretty good.

[1] http://imgur.com/2MpXx6a

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/ember-cli

Apart from other technical reasons, Angular is backed by Google.

Ember Data was incomplete for a long time after Ember was new. It may have been usable, but it came with a lot of scary don't-use-this language.

Google makes angular a trend although I think it hard to adapt. I prefer backbone. It is easy to learn and keep view layer clean unlike angular.

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