I feel that Angular and Ember are nearing this point. And I think they're reaching it at pretty much the same time. Simply cresting the mountain isn't enough; Now it's time for both frameworks to take a trip down the other side.
It seems to me that Angular's path has been primarily driven by a desire to create a highly extensible, clean, simple, concise API, to allow developers the power and freedom to accomplish their goals. They've certainly done that. In spades. But not without some pain to those developers. With freedom comes the ability to shoot yourself in the foot and enough rope to hang yourself with.
Ember, on the other hand, chose a path of guiding developers to create software easily and safely by providing a broad set of tools, structure and rules to follow. And they have definitely succeeded. But again, not without some pain for the developers. That broad set of tools, the expected structure and all of the rules that go with them must be learned in order to master the framework, and it’s perhaps too much for some to digest.
The Angular and Ember communities are the ones pushing the web forward
All of the new features available to us in modern browsers are powerful and amazing, but it’s these two frameworks that truly enable developers to create content that leverages that power in a way that’s pushing the web forward.
It is my hope that there will be increased cooperation between these two core teams, so that they can create something more perfect than they each already have. It certainly seems possible. There are a lot of future developments in this space that both frameworks have overlapping concerns with: Web Components, Shadow DOM, ECMAScript 6 (and beyond), even the future of HTML standards.
More importantly, I hope to see more interaction between the Angular and Ember communities (meaning you, dear reader) in general. Sharing techniques and strategies across frameworks only serves to give everyone a better understanding of web development and help these two frameworks evolve.
Maybe one day they will be one framework… Maybe one day we’ll all be Embular developers.
Links to the rest of this series:
Part 1 - Comparing Ember and Angular
Part 2 - What's Great About Angular
Part 3 - What's Great About Ember
Part 4 - What Angular Could Learn From Ember
Part 5 - What Ember Could Learn From Angular
Part 6 - Two Paths Up The Same Mountain