The document discusses setting up a Ruby on Rails backend API to work with an Ember.js frontend application for a research tool called researchR. The backend is built with Rails and sets up models, controllers, serializers and authentication using Devise. The frontend is built with Ember-CLI and includes routes, controllers, models, templates and authentication using ember-cli-simple-auth and ember-auth-devise to connect to Devise. A Chrome extension is also configured to wrap the frontend and backend together for use in Chrome.