That's def a job for the adapters. Django, for instance, has a REST adapter that has been worked on here: https://github.com/toranb/ember-data-django-rest-adapter

As far as the root objects are concerned, I've always been a fan of that part of Rails. Not to say that it cannot be easily gotten rid of with something like this (for ActiveResource)...

ActiveResource::Base.include_root_in_json = false

Or, like in my example app, with this (for ActiveModelSerializers)...

https://github.com/rails-api/active_model_serializers#1-disa...