Building Web Apps with Ember.js

Chapter 3.  Ember Boilerplate and Workflow

Now that we have a firm grasp of the basics of Ember applications, it is time to begin setting up a professional workflow. This is an important step in the process but isn’t absolutely necessary. That being said, if you are interested in saving valuable time, creating a maintainable codebase, and preparing for testing, then it is recommended to do some initial work in setting up your development environment. You will thank us later. 

At the time of this writing, and with the Ember 1.0 release, there are a number of tools available to manage boilerplate and workflow of Ember applications. Until tooling and workflow are a part of core, this will remain a bit confusing when choosing best practices. In the end, developer workflow and the tools used to manage it are highly subjective, a matter of preference, and controversial. We will take a neutral stance here by presenting only the facts.

Currently, there are four projects that provide varying degrees of functionality into workflow management and boilerplate-code creation:

Yeoman’s Ember Generator

Yeoman, a collection of tools, provides an Ember application generator and individual subgenerators for models, views, and controllers. 

Ember Tools

A project created and maintained by Ryan Florence.   The Ember community has stated that Ember Tools will be merged with Ember App Kit into core in the future. Ember Tools uses Browserify, a project by James Halliday that provides the capability ...