great idea and I just had the same one after using the knockout version. What about publishing the source code on github and let us all contribute. Ember really needs this kind of Guides/Tutorial because it lags a bit on information for new users.

Cheers
Mike

Well, it had to happen. It turns out that the thinking described in the blog post led me to experiment with Interactive Smooth Coffeescript, which, combined with the unexpectedly quick development of some of our Javascript-based molecular modeling software, has led me to to change the focus of the work which I began with learn.ember.js. I’ve moved away from the problem of commercial web programming per se and toward creating an editable, literate-programming style of interface suitable for discussing and experimenting with computational simulations that run in the browser.

I’ll be writing my next blog post, examining Coffeescript syntax and specifically how it makes Coffeescript easier to use than Javascript for programming with the types of abstractions described in the classic paper, “Why Functional Programming Matters”, soon. Then I’ll explore how to build Smooth Coffeescript-like documents that embed reader-editable code which can drive, and plot results from, physics simulations that run in the browser.

(By the way, one of my conclusions from the learn.ember.js experiment is that it’s compelling to use such a tutorial on an iPad, and whereas CodeMirror can work in Mobile Safari on iOS5, the Ace editor doesn’t.)

I like your idea of expanding the learn.ember project. I looked around and don’t see any projects that really focus on making it easy to create tutorials and references. The closest were a couple guides:
http://spyrestudios.com/the-anatomy-of-a-great-tutorial/
http://menwithpens.ca/great-tutorial/

A framework that simplifies tutorial and reference creation seems like an unmet need that would benefit many – especially if it incorporated lessons from online learning research. Are you interested in others contributing?

On a separate topic, thank you for writing this post. I never knew Concord existed until I ran across it while searching for Ember tutorials. Your focus areas and mission rock! The research, publications, and projects sections contain some very cool work.

The dev position also sounds fantastic. I’ve been looking for opportunities prototyping research interfaces in an agile environment and haven’t seen anything close. As it happens, I live in Cambridge and am doing a fellowship with a company whose technologies can gather some amazing learning-related data. For example, it’s possible to measure real-time cognitive states like confusion levels and “aha” moments using just X/Y mouse coordinates. I’m curious how hard it would be to adapt the technologies to support Concord’s researchers… hmm. Regardless, cool position. Sending a resume.

Adam

Sorry about that message — apparently blog commenting is still another another one of the unsolved problems of computer science.

I think that the jsFiddle idea is great — in general, I think we as a culture are not nearly as intelligent about recombining loosely-coupled services as we could be (an idea I get from Jon Udell who for a decade been pushing for a kind of citizens’ literacy about recombining web services to solve real problems.)

On the other hand, I’ll probably continue to go down the path I’ve started on for this project. But I feel like I owe you an explanation.

One reason is that this is simply a learning project for me. I got to know SproutCore pretty well by using it for a real project, and I’d like to have a similar depth of engagement with Ember before I structure a work project around it. That means building an app with it, not just writing tutorials where you can gloss over tricky hang-ups without realizing it.

I also want to (eventually) make the tutorial work offline, which is probably difficult to do with jsFiddle, and I also hope to grow this project into something to be used for non-web development topics, which means I want some custom control over the presentation and logic.

However, your point is well taken. I’ll probably prototype and maybe publish some tutorials with embedded jsFiddles, and I would encourage everyone to try the same — jsFiddle is designed to be embedded nicely in a small iframe.

Cheers,

–Richard

I just wrote a response and got an AVH “Cheating Huh” message after posting. Unsure whether the response worked or not.

In a nutshell, I was curious if you might be able to achieve 90% of the effect with 50% of the effort using one pane for the tutorial, and jsFiddle in the others. Load new fiddles for each tutorial stage. Most of the SEO would come from the tutorial pane, and jsFiddle provides forkability and an editor by default.

Adam