That has nothing to do with Ember, it's a JQuery thing. If JQuery is expecting content type of JSON, an empty response [will trigger an error](http://jquery.com/upgrade-guide/1.9/#jquery-ajax-returning-a-json-result-of-an-empty-string). For cases when the response will be blank, you should override the dataType setting. See the section on dataType in the [jQuery.ajax() docs](http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/).