I am starting on a new project that uses Ember.js.

I started learning it from scratch a few days ago. Thought it would be a good opportunity to log my gut reactions while I find out how it works.

My main term of comparison will be React.js, which I started learning in about February 2015. I have spent a decent amount of time working with it. Far less than on jQuery-based projects in the past, but still. I also know a bit of Angular 1, so that may come up too.

I will go for free-associative, bullet-list, initial reactions for this post.

• Official website is organized and pretty enough.
• Really easy to download and have a local server running with a blank app.
• No webpack. I like that.
• ES6. Great.
• Official tutorial does tests. Awesome.
• Tutorial is very clearly written. Can’t compare to what I came across when I started with React.
• Handlebar templates. I don’t know about that. Better than jsx perhaps? I miss jade, slim, wonder if it can work with something like that.
• Bower? Not happy to see that.
• All package names seem to start with ember-cli. Welcome and scary at the same time.
• What’s the difference between a controller and the other entities, helpers etc? Still pretty foggy at this point.
• Easy to install Stylus for CSS. Heard about “ember pods”. Will investigate.
• Extremely easy to deploy something crude to Heroku, even without doing anything about the env.
• Oh gosh, there’s an ember package to load Google Fonts.