I am planning to start development with Node.js and I decided to use a stack of MongoDB and Express.js with a topping of Ember.js. When it comes to choosing templating for my views, I found two possible solutions, namely Jade and Handlebars.
My issue is that after a bunch of searches I found that Handlebars is often mentioned as the de facto templating for Ember.js, while Jade is mentioned as the de facto for Node.
I heard people say that if I don't use Handlebars with Ember I'm losing much of the goodness that Ember provides.
On the other hand, I heard the same analogy with Node.js and Jade, and I also kind of like Jade more for its Haml-like syntax.
Which should I choose of the two? Do I really lose functionality if I choose one over the other? I feel like I have to.
In my opinion there is no doubt you will want to use handlebars for your Ember templates. One of the biggest features of ember is data binding and how it works with handlebars. If you 100% want to manage handling updating everything manually when data changes within the application then you can use whatever templating engine you want. But in that case I am not even sure you want to use Ember.
In the typical use case you will only be returning JSON from the nodejs server and you won't need to use a templating engine to handle returning JSON.
What I have done is just created a static html page for the Ember application and the used node as an api server part of the application. All of the views are rendered through Ember. The only time a call is made to node is to get data for ember to use to generate the views, or to handle persisting changes to data.
Here is an example of how I tend to handle your stack. This is just the starting point of a little side project I am playing with to learn Ember that might help.