JSON-API is a spec for JSON contracts between APIs and their clients. Because ember-data uses JSON-API by default, and as a guide for its internal data structures, it's useful to be familiar with it when working with ember-data.

If you’ve ever argued with your team about the way your JSON responses should be formatted, JSON API can be your anti-bikeshedding tool.

By following shared conventions, you can increase productivity, take advantage of generalized tooling, and focus on what matters: your application.

Clients built around JSON API are able to take advantage of its features around efficiently caching responses, sometimes eliminating network requests entirely.

Ember-data adapters are responsible for building URLs, and making other customizations to outgoing requests. We'll begin by establishing the URL & JSON contracts that ember-data has turnkey adapters for, and then explore a wide range of customization hooks that you can use to make ember-data work with your API.

Ember-data serializers are the tool for transforming your API's representation of data into what your ember app expects. We'll examine several common use cases for massaging JSON, including:

• changing the names of properties
• normalizing property key format
• synthesizing client-side IDs

Ember-data's store is the main API surface that developers interact with, in order to initiate requests for data.

By specifying custom ember-data transforms, we can define new types of attributes on our model. We'll build our own "color", "array" and "object" custom ember-data transforms.