[TheBrockEllis]

As a new comer to Ember, I am quite confused as to the necessity of the Rails portion of the tutorial. I read through the intro and the first chapter and all I could gather was that it was for the "back end". I really wish there was a great, up-to-date tutorial that was back-end agnostic so that newbies don't have to possibly learn two new frameworks at once.

[genghisjahn]

Totally agreed. I went glassy eyed at "First create new rvm gemset to sandbox our gems:"

If you are a RoR person, I'm sure this tutorial is just great. But for the rest of us...

[hpvic03]

That's a valid complaint. I wrote it with a Rails backend because that's a pretty popular backend choice for Ember, and they work together well.

Perhaps I can just extract out the Ember portion -- It should still be applicable regardless of the backend.

[Nemcue]

Do you even /need/ a backend though?

It would be much simpler if you keep it entirely client side, using something like Pretender (https://github.com/trek/pretender).

[hpvic03]

To persist data you'll want a backend. That's a fairly important piece of any application which is why I included it in the tutorial. You could ignore the Rails parts of the tutorial and create your own backend.

[pyre]

Persist across clients, maybe, but it's also possible to use localStorage to persist data on a single client.

[TheBrockEllis]

You could also use something like Firebase as a datastore that could persist across multiple clients but also be implemented in javascript.

[endemic]

Maybe stub out the backend with an Express app? Express seems simple enough that even if you're not familiar with it, you can still understand what it's trying to do.

[TheBrockEllis]

And you'd keep most of the code in javascript so new comers wouldn't get "culture shock" by having to learn completely new syntax. +1

[wasd]

Would you consider Parse/Firebase?

[rubiquity]

What's funny about that is that step is completely unnecessary. At least, I have never had to create a gemset and I have had up to 20 different Ruby applications on my machine at a time. Bundler solved this problem.

[baddox]

It's pretty tough to make a tutorial for literally everyone. Heck, some people use CoffeeScript and some use JavaScript, and any of them might be upset if your tutorial uses the other.

If someone wrote a plain Ember tutorial that just assumed the backend API already existed, just as many people might make the complaint "if you already have a backend, I'm sure this tutorial is just great, but for the rest of us..."