I attended the conference, and the topic (framework vs. framework vs. library) was definitely timely. There are strong points of contention between the major competing frameworks/libraries right now, and this was reflected in the panel discussions.
What struck me about the talks I saw was the degree to which each project strongly reflects the personalities of its authors; Jeremy Ashkenas was indeed (as the article says) the calm zen master of the panels, taking a minimally-prescriptive stance on how his code should shape your code.
Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz, on the other hand, came in with passionate arguments for the idea that JS frameworks should have strong opinions and exert a great deal of influence on your code and the outcome of your solutions. Katz's central thesis seemed to be that for highly common problems for which Ember would be used, extremely similar (if not identical) solutions should emerge.
All in all a good conference, and very differently-flavoured from JSConf.
What struck me about the talks I saw was the degree to which each project strongly reflects the personalities of its authors; Jeremy Ashkenas was indeed (as the article says) the calm zen master of the panels, taking a minimally-prescriptive stance on how his code should shape your code.
Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz, on the other hand, came in with passionate arguments for the idea that JS frameworks should have strong opinions and exert a great deal of influence on your code and the outcome of your solutions. Katz's central thesis seemed to be that for highly common problems for which Ember would be used, extremely similar (if not identical) solutions should emerge.
All in all a good conference, and very differently-flavoured from JSConf.