Ember.js and Drupal: a lovestory

Ember.js is a frontend framework that is gaining traction and popularity because of its best practices and conventions. In its new version, Ember.js embraces standards such as JSON API that makes it very attractive to integrate with a Drupal backend in a headless/decoupled approach.

In this talk, we will demonstrate how to integrate Ember.js with a Drupal 8 backend based in JSON API and will describe what options are out there for providing a solid API from a Drupal 8 perspective.

We will also discuss about why and when to decouple a project and what challenges and solutions we have found at OIST (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology) while building a decoupled system based in Ember.js and Drupal for our internal communications tool. This tool assists students and researchers that come to Japan from all over the world to work and study at OIST.

Attendees to this talk will see how to combine Drupal 8 and Ember.js, how to display content coming from Drupal in the browser through Ember.js, how to manage difficult problems such as authentication, image upload, proxy servers... through example and with real and ready to use solutions.

This session will be useful for everyone evaluating frameworks to use with Drupal as a content backend, and both frontend and backend developers considering learning more about Javascript frameworks and Ember.js in particular.

This session has been presented with success at DrupalCamp Japan 2017 in Tokyo and slides are available at https://pcambra.github.io/ember-drupal. The session content will be updated for DrupalCon to the latest stable Ember.js version and Drupal 8 version.