Better understanding of EmberJS and how it's constructed.

What I've learned is that each action relates to a specific rout and requires a controller.  Each of those controllers has a 'content' field which represents the model that is displayed in the view (aka handlebars template).
Fields on the model must match the fields on the model of your backing API.  In our case that API is a rails controller and since naming is consistent between the frontend and the backend, a model can be seamlessly saved into the database.