hinshun / blog-api

example blog api for an ember presentation

Simple Emberjs Blog App with Rails API

Created for a presentation

Getting Started

Installation

Let's start off by installing the required gems for this project...

gem 'ember-rails'
gem 'ember-source'

... and install those gems

$ bundle install

The gem ember-rails comes with a bootstrap generator that will scaffold out our application. By ember conventions, let's default our application name in the browser's window as App

$ bundle exec rails g ember:bootstrap --app-name="App"

Integrating with Rails

Out of the box, ember-rails has trouble requiring the javascript files in the right order. We're going to fix this by renaming the file and ensure that the Ember app is initialized before our models/controllers/etc are loaded.

# Rename application.js.coffee to ember.js.coffee
$ mv app/assets/javascripts/application.js.coffee app/assets/javascripts/ember_application.js.coffee

Explicitly require ember.js.coffee so that requiring order is under our control

# app/assets/javascripts/application.js
...
//= require ember_application
//= require_tree .

And let's get rid of a deprecation warning for using App.Store

# app/assets/javascripts/store.js.coffee
App.ApplicationStore = DS.Store.extend({
...

Let's create a base controller for anchoring our Ember app. Note that we don't have to render anything except for the layout which will have our javascript include tags.

One nice thing is that we can still use Rail's great asset pipeline for our Ember App.

# app/controllers/ember_controller.rb
class EmberController < ApplicationController
  def index
    render text: '', layout: 'application'
  end
end

Anchor our application root to use the Ember controller we just created...

# config/routes.rb
root to: 'ember#index'

And let's finish it off by deleting the public index.html

# Delete public index.html
$ rm public/index.html