Brandon W. wrote in post #1110341:
> I'm trying to figure out decisively what the uses are for Javascript
> frameworks such as Angular and Ember in regards to Rails. My immediate
> reaction to them was that it's an extra step that's being added and
> clogging up the code of the application, but that's a rather biased view
> considering I've never used one much less really comprehend their use.
I wouldn't call your view of them biased, but rather a complete
misunderstanding of what these frameworks are, and the problem they are
designed to solve.
> The other point I'm trying to figure out is if we're writing all this
> code and using Rails as a front end for all of this, then why don't we
> skip a step and go to node.js for it?
You have missed the fundamental point to these frameworks. Rails is
actually being used here as a back-end to support a front-end written in
Angular or Ember.
Think of these as Model-View-Controller for your client-side JavaScript.
While these frameworks may take very different approaches to the problem
these are designed to solve the same problem. Which it basically to add
structure to your client side code the way Rails adds structure to your
server side code.
Node.js has nothing to do with any of your points. Node.js is JavaScript
running on the server. It makes no difference to Angular and Ember
whether its data (model) is delivered from the server by Ruby,
JavaScript or whatever.
> Again, I'm new to the concept of these frameworks, so I'm not sure
> exactly what to think.
If you're really interested in knowing more about these JavaScript
frameworks why don't you at least take a few minutes to actually read
the overviews on their respective web sites and try to understand what
they actually are:
http://emberjs.com
http://angularjs.org
http://backbonejs.org