I'm building an Ember application with ember-cli and, as a persistence layer, an HTTP API using rails-api + Grape + ActiveModelSerializer. I am at a very basic stage but I want to setup my front-end and back-end in as much standard and clean way as possible before going on with developing further API and ember models.
I could not find a comprensive guide about serialization and deserialization made by the store but I read the documentation about DS.ActiveModelSerializer and DS.ActiveModelAdapter (which says the same things!) along with their parent classes.
What are the exact roles of adapter and serializer and how are they related?
Considering the tools I am using do I need to implement both of them?
Both Grape/ActiveModelSerializer and EmberData offer customization. As my back-end and front-end are for each other and not for anything else which side is it better to customize?
Hmmm...which side is better is subjective, so this is sort of my thought process:
Generally speaking, one would want an API that is able to "talk to anything" in case a device client is required or in case the API gets to be consumed by other parties in the future, so that would suggest that you'd config your Ember App to talk to your backend. But again, I think this is a subjective question/answer 'cause no one but you and your team can tell what's good for a given scenario you are or might be experiencing while the app gets created.
I think the guides explain the Adapter and Serializer role/usage and customization pretty decently these days.
As for implementing them, it may be necessary to create an adapter for your application to define a global namespace if you have one (if your controllers are behind another area like localhost:3000/api/products, then set namespace: 'api' otherwise this is not necessary), or similarly the host if you're using cors, and if you're doing with cli you might want to set the security policy in the environment to allow connections to other domains for cors and stuff like that. This can be done per model as well. But again, all of this is subjective as it depends on what you want/need to achieve.