Part 2. Building ambitious web apps for the real world

Part 1 guided you through the core Ember.js features and functionality, while familiarizing you with the conventions used throughout Ember.js applications. Part 2 shifts the focus slightly so you can explore how to make Ember.js applications come alive.

Part 2 introduces the case study that forms the basis for most of this book’s sample code, Montric. Montric is an open source tool for monitoring application performance. Its front end is written in Ember.js. Its back end is Java-based, running on top of a horizontal scalable database, Riak.

You start by learning how to integrate server-side communication via Ember Router, first using Ember Data beta 2 in chapter 5, and then moving on to rolling your own model layer in chapter 6.

After sorting out the server-side communication options, you move on to another important core feature of Ember.js: custom components. Although self-contained components were added late in the development toward Ember.js v1.0.0, this feature is powerful and much-needed. Chapter 7 discusses Ember.js’s approach to self-contained components by first introducing a few simple components and then combining them into new, more-complex components.

Before leaving part 2, you take an in-depth look at testing your Ember.js application. Chapter 8 shows you how to use QUnit and Phantom.js to build a complete testing strategy.