"That throwing away all of your models and views by default when a different route matches is actually the opposite of the approach you normally want to take -- at least if you're hoping to achieve a smooth app-like look and feel..."
This is actually a really important point. This is exactly how Ember's router works, as far as I can see from the documentation - when you transition, you lose all prior state. It's essentially trying to emulate traditional routing, which defeats the point.
Apologies, this is what I get for not drinking coffee before commenting. You're completely right about keeping state when it comes to models.
What I don't see - and again, I have not dived very deeply into the router; I'm going off the documentation here - is how to keep views during the transition. In my app, the router has to re-render all views when changing between routes. This isn't a huge deal, as it's a very lightweight application. Still, Backbone offers much more flexibility when it comes to views.
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"That throwing away all of your models and views by default when a different route matches is actually the opposite of the approach you normally want to take -- at least if you're hoping to achieve a smooth app-like look and feel..."
This is actually a really important point. This is exactly how Ember's router works, as far as I can see from the documentation - when you transition, you lose all prior state. It's essentially trying to emulate traditional routing, which defeats the point.
This isn't even close to how Ember's router works. The whole point of controllers in Ember is to preserve client state (including between routes).
Apologies, this is what I get for not drinking coffee before commenting. You're completely right about keeping state when it comes to models.
What I don't see - and again, I have not dived very deeply into the router; I'm going off the documentation here - is how to keep views during the transition. In my app, the router has to re-render all views when changing between routes. This isn't a huge deal, as it's a very lightweight application. Still, Backbone offers much more flexibility when it comes to views.
Views are meant to be transient and just a step above the lifecycle of the html elements themselves.