At the end of October, we had the pleasure of attending the first edition of EmberCamp in London. We’ve chosen four of our favourite presentations to share with you.

EmberCamp Recap

At the end of October, we had the pleasure of attending the first edition of EmberCamp in London. There was great content thanks to the presentations of the core Ember maintainers, a lovely atmosphere amongst the Ember community, fantastic networking opportunities and, last but not least, fascinating use cases. EmberCamp was everything we hoped it would be, and we will definitely be attending the next edition!

We’ve chosen four of our favourite presentations to share with you. Of course, every presentation is worth watching, but these are really extraordinary. If you'd like to see the rest, grab the full list from here.

Composable Components

Miguel Camba surprised us with his astonishing presentation about reusable components. Many developers are prone to creating multi-tool addons, bloated with tons of options in an attempt to fit every use case. Miguel advocates a simple and powerful idea - to do the opposite. He believes that we should start with the minimum and build our components like Lego so that, later, we would be able to easily create more complex solutions.

As an example, he showed us his own select input component. By coincidence, here at Netguru, we had just finished our own open source select input component based on a similar idea!

You should check out his presentation - it’s loaded with fresh, eye-opening ideas.

The Hidden Power of Handlebars

Matthew Beale - an Ember core team member - started his presentation with a blast of humour. He ludicrously compared similarities and differences between American and British English and then smoothly transitioned to his keynote about improvements in Ember 2.x templates.

With Ember 2.x templates, you can now start to think about the scope like in JavaScript - as a static scope. This is really important because now you can develop using the patterns and tools you would use in a real language - like closures, for example. Matthew showed us a few examples of how we can use lexical scope thinking in Ember templates to our advantage. You can see everything in his presentation.

Ember at Intercom

Intercom is a huge customer service interface product. The presentation by Gavin Joyce didn’t dive too deeply into Ember’s internals. In fact, it didn't even show any new features. Instead, it showed us the real power of Ember. Gavin told the story of introducing Ember to Intercom around 18 months ago.

He showed that Ember lets a small team of engineers do a huge amount of work extremely quickly. He clearly demonstrated that Ember.js is a framework which significantly improves the speed, reliability and maintenance of development. I noticed the same obstacles and the same solutions that we implemented in Ember projects at Netguru. It’s reassuring to see that we’ve bet on the right technology!

Ember-cli-deploy

This presentation was a duet by Aaron Chambers and Luke Melia. These guys really put on a great show - it was fantastic and full of funny jokes. However, the most important thing was the big release of version 0.5 of ember-cli-deploy. At Netguru, we haven’t invested in this solution, as we’ve been using our own capistrano-based deployment process. Surprisingly, I found ember-cli-deploy more ember-cli compliant, easier to extend and, crucially, it lacks the most common deployment problem - node package version conflicts in server environments.

I will definitely give ember-cli-deploy a chance and see if it's more stable and reliable than our process. The power of plugins will definitely make it easier to cover each deployment case we encounter in our projects at Netguru. We’ll let you know how it turns out! Meanwhile, check out the presentation!

Summary

In conclusion - EmberCamp was a great event for both beginners and advanced developers. Ember.js is beautiful - not only because of its code base but also due to its thriving community (whom it was a pleasure to meet in person). If you are interested in modern JavaScript frameworks and want to stay up to date, you should definitely visit the next edition of EmberCamp in 2016 - we’ll be there for sure!