I'm making an essay about AngularJS vs EmberJS. In here I compare these two with different questions and at the end a decision is made for which one is better for developing web applications based on the answers of these questions.
One question that I have struggled with for EmberJS is about maintainability. I haven't been able to find one article that gives information about this, unlike AngularJS.
I would like to know how does EmberJS helps you maintain your EmberJS web application. What concepts or whatever, does it provide to help you achieve a high level of maintainability for your web applications build with EmberJS.
Thank you for any help regarding answering this question.
How does Ember help you maintain your application?
Some of this is subjective/debatable, but in the spirit of essays, here are some points for Ember in terms of maintainability:
Because Ember is so highly opinionated, it makes it really easy for other Ember developers to understand your project quickly and pick up where you left off. While the framework has a pretty infamous learning curve, once you're comfortable with Ember, most applications share a lot of similarities. Ember has a prescribed 'way' for doing most things -- from file structure to REST api interaction. If you've worked on one Ember project, moving in to do maintenance on another should feel very familiar. It's a big, standardized toolbox.
The Ember Inspector browser plugin gives you a lot of transparency into what's going on beneath the hood of your application. It's very helpful to debug and maintain Ember apps. I haven't really seen anything yet that's quite the same for other frameworks. (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ember-inspector/bmdblncegkenkacieihfhpjfppoconhi?hl=en)
Ember's handlebars templates don't allow you to put complex logic in your template. Any "if" check in a template must refer to a boolean value. This means less places to look to track down what you need to work on, and more testing of raw functions because your view isn't handling more than basic logic. It also encourages more readable templates.
Ember comes with built-in tooling for unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests. This encourages devs to build tests for their applications or contribute to the existing tests of a project. Tests are good for maintainability.
Good luck!