Getting started with Ember.js is hard. It's one thing to look at code samples, snippets, and toy applications stuffed into a single file. It's quite another to figure out how to structure a large-scale, modular application.
Enter Charcoal. Charcoal is a generator for Yeoman that creates project scaffolding for you. It will give you a great preconfigured Gruntfile, a Bower file with Ember dependencies set up, an easy-to-use dependency/module system for your scripts, and testing that works with no extra configuration.
Simply put, it's the easiest way to write Ember since Ember-Rails, except now it's backend-agnostic.
Charcoal has:
A project generator. yo charcoal will get you set up with everything a modern Ember application needs to build. The default Gruntfile comes with pre-configured tasks that will make development a breeze.
Super-simple dependencies with grunt-neuter. Dependencies between scripts in Charcoal are handled with simple require('dir/script') directives. It's as easy as Sprockets/Asset Pipeline's //require directives.
Testing out of the box. Charcoal applications come with the Mocha test framework and the Chai assertion library, giving you freedom to write your tests in whatever style you want, whether BDD, TDD, or even QUnit-style asserts.
A Bower file for the easiest browser dependency management ever. Want to upgrade to a new version of Ember? Just change the version in your Bower file.
Convenient, preconfigured multitasks. grunt server will create a development server that will automatically recompile your files when they change (and even reload your browser), grunt test will run your Mocha tests in PhantomJS, grunt test-server will create a web server for running your tests in a browser, and grunt build will build your app for distribution.
Easy customization. Since you're using Grunt, adding a new task is as simple as installing the dependency, creating configuration, and adding it to the above multitasks.
No weird external dependencies. You're writing JavaScript, why the hell should you have to install Ruby?
A development guide for new users, bundled with every project. No longer will anyone working on your repo have to fear figuring out your build tools.
To get started with it, install Yeoman and Charcoal:
npm install -g yo npm install -g generator-charcoal
Create a new project folder:
mkdir my_project && cd my_project
Generate a new project:
yo charcoal
And test it out:
grunt server
You should see a working example application. Then, just follow the development guide (added to your project under charcoal/readme.md) to learn how to create applications with Charcoal.
Charcoal is on GitHub if you'd like to add changes or report bugs. I'm excited to see what you build with it!
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