What is the Ember controller? It is most certainly not a Rails controller.
Coming to the Ember framework with a Rails perspective has caused a bit of confusion for me.
There are a few assumptions that I have made, and now realize the need to go back and get the basic
terminology correct before proceeding. Without further ado… the Ember controller…
According to the Ember docs, Ember controllers:
allow you to decorate your models with display logic
The Ember controller is a decorator! (Check out Martin Folwer’s Presentation model or the similar Model-View-ViewModel for more on the pattern)
This controller is auto-generated in Ember if not explicitly defined, and provides logic to the template.
It does handle custom actions from the template that you do not necessarily want to store in the model e.g. a form in the process of being edited by the user.
Perhaps this is a Rails issue and not an Ember issue, I don’t know, as the Rails controller is a Rack app of sorts.
Fortunately, the Controller terminology will be deprecated in favor of web components in Ember 2.0.
The functionality will largely be the same, but the conflicting definitions between Rails and Ember will disappear.