For the past week, our CTO Dave Wilcox has been taking a look at potential web app frameworks. For Brainworth's purposes, tooling around with these kinds of things needs to be rigorous as we're demanding a lot, so a solid five days Dave's been trying in vain to get Ember JS do the job.

Our first set of challenges will teach prospective programmers about AI by asking them to learn the basic steps of creating an autonomous snake from the game popularised by the Nokia 2110. Ember JS would have been used to spice up the currently somewhat rudimentary challenge client when controlling the snakes, however it was still very much in its early stages, making implementation difficult.

While the functionality it promises is encouraging, at present its documentation is sparse and 'working examples' from only 2 months ago no longer working.

Two days ago, Dave went back and reassessed Angular JS, having initially made the jump from Angular over to Ember, so the challenge client will continue to be driven by Angular for the time being.

This is not to say Ember JS isn't a robust piece of technology, and one that we can very well see ourselves using in the future - just that it's currently languishing in the wake of a more polished and professional product. Time will tell, however, and within our network of nodes and challenges, there will be countless other opportunities to experiment with different frameworks moving forward.

Our environment doesn't demand that we affix ourselves too strongly to any one choice at present, so we look eagerly forward to seeing what Ember can do in the future.