[erichocean]

Ember is definitely an alternative to Backbone, but people should stop conflating Ember with SproutCore: the two frameworks are targeted at completely different types of apps.

FWIW, the SproutCore community has rejected the Ember approach for the kinds of apps SproutCore is meant for: large, desktop-style apps that need to run fast in modern web browsers. The supposed "features" Ember provides, like auto-updating templates, have proven to have such bad performance in existing SproutCore apps that developers have almost universally been ripping them out (this was discovered at the most recent SproutCore User Group last month).

Ember is an alternative to Backbone -- a 600 LOC micro-framework. That should tell you all you need to know about Ember's scope. (SproutCore is well over 20K LOC.)