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If you want to build a real-time collaboration app today, what you would you use instead?
I built a major project in Meteor last summer, and it was a big mistake. For the most part, Meteor itself is stable and being actively developed, but many of the packages are experiencing severe rot, and one of the developers of a few of the most used meteor packages recently went out of business and took all their documentation down with them.
Ever since Meteor added native support for NPM packages, many Meteor package developers are only publishing them as NPMs instead of on Atmosphere. That might be why you believe that there's rot.
We still use it, though we are phasing it out. In general, its solid for its use cases, but you need to understand what its good at. Its pretty great for small apps, prototyping, hobby projects, etc. There are a few things we learned that I'd share: Use React. Should be obvious. Meteor's react support is pretty great. Stay away from Meteor packages as much as possible. Its better to look for a similar NPM package and…
You could check out http://vulcanjs.org/ , we're trying to get it to be a "Rails for GraphQL/React".
You'd think majority people of at HH can do basic objective research and look beyond the FUD, but it seems not. Well, let me give you some facts, over the last two years Meteor added support for:
- Out of the box dynamic import https://blog.meteor.com/dynamic-imports-in-meteor-1-5-c61304...
- Importing NPM packages
- React, Vue, and Angular as view layers
- Latest release of Node JS: https://blog.meteor.com/announcing-meteor-1-6-abf30f29e2c6
- Galaxy hosting just for Meteor apps, but you can also deploy anywhere using MUP: https://www.npmjs.com/package/mup
- SSR: https://blog.meteor.com/meteor-platform-is-still-alive-5f642...
- Infinite out of the box reactive scaling using RedisOplog: https://github.com/cult-of-coders/redis-oplog
- Innovative data fetching using Grapher: https://github.com/cult-of-coders/grapher
- Ability to start minimal apps without DDP or Blaze (here meteor is just used as build tool)
- Many popular and active open source packages such as vulcan js and rocket chat, and commercially successful business Qualia with 32 million funding https://www.housingwire.com/articles/42710-qualia-raises-33-...
- Being taught at universities https://blog.meteor.com/teaching-software-engineering-with-m...
There has been major FUD since 2015 when Meteor pivoted out of Blaze (original view layer which has been open sourced) to open up to the rest of the ecosystem and some folks were not happy with that so they wrote few articles which shaped a lot of the FUD we read about here. It's a fact that today Meteor is way more flexible, you can use it as a full-stack, back end or build tool only, and you can pick which area of the stack you'd like to leverage.
It's very active and still, by the far, the most started Node JS framework on Github, it's very mature and stable and growing everyday.
We've been doing doubletime to migrate off of an old Meteor app, due to its bundling of old versions of node and really questionable use of Mongo. I think that, in the right hands, Meteor is a great prototyping tool--putting into production and scaling it though is a fool's errand.
Between GraphQL and React, I'm not sure how much Meteor is left in a modern "Meteor" app.
I guess you can't please everyone.
>Is Meteor.js dead? Yes.
If you want to build a real-time collaboration app today, what you would you use instead?
Node.js. Meteor was dead on arrival to be honest.
and very actively maintained.
People get Meteor wrong. It's basically a sophisticated build tool that takes away a lot of the burden of setting up a working build setup. If you want, Meteor will also provide a robust account management system and a seamless connection between server and client and a few other niceties, such as reactivity out-of-the-box and most recently, my favorite feature, dynamic imports.
I also love Meteor's own package system which provides so much more than Npm-packages ever can. I'd also like to mention Blaze, which seems now pretty unmaintained, but it's actually very solid and stable and works brilliantly with Meteor, especially with the ViewModel-package (supports both React and Blaze).
Meteor is awesome and it's only getting better.
The only use cases I wouldn't pick Meteor for are the ones where static sites shine, for those I'd opt for Gatsby or Nuxt.
Finding people is the hard part for us as a business, so finding a balance between technology and available skills was a priority. Since Meteor is a public framework, it has a ready ecosystem for onboarding (tutorials, etc), plus with being standardized it reduces complexity for onboarding. Any JS dev can pick it up in a few weeks. It has enough checks and balances to ensure some level of consistency in implementation, but beyond that, you need to setup your own process anyway. Again being standardized, it helps with BCP as well.
Since Meteor is isomorphic, it gives us a very interesting advantage of tying code ownership to both front and backend code, which results in functional ownership not just code ownership. That emphasizes full-stack development, which is a priority for us. Our mantra is to do more with few people as we can, and Meteor lets us do that very well.
Technologically, Meteor gives us access to a wide variety of capabilities as a technology team. NPM opens up the JS ecosystem, Apollo/MDG gives us the ability to move towards GraphQL if needed, build tools allows us to push code for web and mobile environments out-of-the-box, integrations allow us to handle scaling, and Meteor has gotten better at opening up options to allow for more granular tuning (queries, reactivity, etc.).
It might not be the most performant, but honestly I'd rather throw an extra $50-100/m at hardware on DO/Linode, than justify having to hire more people.
It helps that we're not planning at building apps targeted at millions of users, but when you hit that kind of scale, refactoring is anyway going to happen. This quote from DHH (https://twitter.com/dhh/status/885445986943868929) is the best way to explain this anyway :)
As has been highlighted by others, MDG is still releasing updates to Meteor regularly, so there's not much reason to doubt they're stopping anytime soon. In addition, there's been a resurgence in the community to contribute modules to addressing gaps in the ecosystem, which have made Meteor more relevant again for a lot of us.
This is highly opinionated, but for us and the fact that its about doing business, not just the best technology, Meteor ticks enough boxes to make it our choice moving forward.
If you look at it through that lens, I think it makes it viable (valuable even) in 2018.
IMO, I think Meteor is a victim of promising too much too soon. The real value only got unlocked IMO when they made NPM a first-class citizen. As a team, we aren't really missing out on anything being on Meteor. We think it makes us more effective as developers.