Confusion over shoebox, fastboot and ember-data

This is a pretty open-ended issue created after a chat with @kratiahuja on the fastboot slack channel. Not sure on the best format for this since it’s pretty vague, but hoping to kick off a chat.

Currently, implementing fastboot with shoebox support is a bit tough when pulling ember-data into the equation. The reason is because you have to keep 3 states in mind for each route transiton

• Fastboot
• Non fastboot same model
• Non fastboot different model

The issue stems from the idea that that the shoebox is a pretty basic API allowing you to handle rehydration of your apps on your own. There are a few projects out there right now that are looking at ember-data hydrating instead of ember, but they kind of miss the mark as well. The reason is because ember-data will still issue network requests for query calls or really anything outside of a direct find request.

To make this work, it seems like ember-data and fastboot need to work much more closely together.

[HarenBroog]

I’ve done simple proof of concept here: https://github.com/appchance/ember-cached-shoe. This add-on simply saves AJAX responses in the shoebox on the fastboot side and retrieves them in the browser. No more duplicated requests. Maybe you will find it useful 😃

[kratiahuja]

Yeah. Let me think more on this during my week commute. I am pretty sure we can come up with something of a declarative API that makes this better (now that i imagine it more, it is isn’t as user friendly). We should probably jump on a hangout to discuss sometime once we have clear ideas hashed out.