A brief cheatsheet on when to use each of Ember's core classes

• Component

  • encapsulating a part of your web page
  • enhancing native DOM elements
  • capturing and responding to user input

• Service

  • network calls that aren't in the route transition hierarchy (e.g. on user interaction)
  • stuffing data or state that is shared across the app

• Controller

  • gluing together components and services
  • to stuff things when you don't have time to think about architecture

• View

  • don't

• Route

  • making network requests that are required by the page

• Object

  • when you want {} or ES6 Class, but with all the get/set/computed goodness of Ember

• Helper

  • formatting parts of what's displayed on the page

• DS.Model

  • giving shape to network responses so they are more usable

• DS.Store

  • making network requests for defined objects, so that they get auto-added and available

• DS.Adapter

  • changing network address of defined objects when network calls are made

• DS.Serializer

  • munging data to and from the server

• DS.Transform

  • defining primitive types that you want to serialize network requests to and from