Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Feathers 2.0 – a minimalist real-time JavaScript framework

blog.feathersjs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 83 posts

Re: Feathers 2.0 – a minimalist real-time JavaScript framework

#11

Post by ekryski »

dangoor wrote: post #4

The title (which is not the title of the original article) makes it sound as if Meteor is not open source. Meteor is open source, and MIT-licensed at that.

Disclosure, I'm one of the creators of Feathers.

You are right Feathers is MIT and so is Meteor. They both do real-time, albeit a bit differently, so we like to consider Meteor an alternative to Feathers and vice-versa.

We are trying to be as transparent as possible and because we don't currently have any formal support from anyone except for the contributor's time and energy, we rely heavily on the community and need to remain as open as possible.

Personally, I think Meteor has done some amazing stuff and some not so amazing things. I respect a lot of what they have achieved but we are making a different attempt at similar problems. Nothing more to it than that really. We've tried to put up objective comparisons between Feathers and many of the real-time solutions out there http://docs.feathersjs.com/why/vs/readme.html. There is no silver bullet for all situations and all people.

Re: Feathers 2.0 – a minimalist real-time JavaScript framework

#13

Post by ekryski »

daffl wrote: post #10
cmpb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering, how are you using ES2015 imports in the browser? Does Feathers come with a built-in module loader parser, or is this a feature of using Vue, or are you doing some other magic?

Feathers doesn't assume much on the client. You can use a module loader or the bundled Feathers client which works right out of the box. To be able to use ES imports in the browser I personally use http://stealjs.com

Yup and I use Webpack. The beauty is you get to take your pick. The downer is it's not set up for you. Tradeoffs for now...

Re: Feathers 2.0 – a minimalist real-time JavaScript framework

#15

Post by ekryski »

ekryski wrote: post #11
dangoor wrote: post #4

The title (which is not the title of the original article) makes it sound as if Meteor is not open source. Meteor is open source, and MIT-licensed at that.

Disclosure, I'm one of the creators of Feathers. You are right Feathers is MIT and so is Meteor. They both do real-time, albeit a bit differently, so we like to consider Meteor an alternative to Feathers and vice-versa. We are trying to be as transparent as possible and because we don't currently have any formal support from anyone except for the contributor's time and energy, we rely heavily on the community and nee…

I will also follow up with, although we mention it on the site, we realize there may an implied bias with the comparisons being on the Feathers site and if anything is incorrect or out of date we want to correct it. So issues and PRs are very welcome!

Re: Feathers 2.0 – a minimalist real-time JavaScript framework

#17

Post by desireco42 »

Pretty interesting. A little overwhelmed with amount of choices. Also not sure what to think, I will have to do example app and see for myself. It does look very promising. I really like that it builds on the work of others instead of reinventing the wheel.

Also, mentioning Meteor, totally not needed.

Re: Feathers 2.0 – a minimalist real-time JavaScript framework

#18

Post by ekryski »

desireco42 wrote: post #17

Pretty interesting. A little overwhelmed with amount of choices. Also not sure what to think, I will have to do example app and see for myself. It does look very promising. I really like that it builds on the work of others instead of reinventing the wheel. Also, mentioning Meteor, totally not needed.

Thanks for that feedback! What are you finding overwhelming? We're always looking to improve.

Re: Feathers 2.0 – a minimalist real-time JavaScript framework

#19

Post by wolframhempel »

mortenjorck wrote: post #8
dangoor wrote: post #4

The title (which is not the title of the original article) makes it sound as if Meteor is not open source. Meteor is open source, and MIT-licensed at that.

I think a much more interesting title would be "An alternative to Meteor supporting 15+ databases and 4 ORMs." I'd imagine a lot of people (myself included) have cooled somewhat on Meteor as SQL support has failed to materialize, so Feather's DB flexibility seems like a standout feature.

Good point. Also have a look at https://deepstream.io , a realtime server that follows the same plug-in design philosophy

Re: Feathers 2.0 – a minimalist real-time JavaScript framework

#20

Post by faceyspacey »

ekryski wrote: post #11
dangoor wrote: post #4

The title (which is not the title of the original article) makes it sound as if Meteor is not open source. Meteor is open source, and MIT-licensed at that.

Disclosure, I'm one of the creators of Feathers. You are right Feathers is MIT and so is Meteor. They both do real-time, albeit a bit differently, so we like to consider Meteor an alternative to Feathers and vice-versa. We are trying to be as transparent as possible and because we don't currently have any formal support from anyone except for the contributor's time and energy, we rely heavily on the community and nee…

Except, claiming you guys are "Real Time" just because you offer a basic websockets implementation and positioning your offering as anything that compares to Meteor is a sham. You don't have real time. You have web sockets that anyone can trivially hook up with NPM. You're undermining Meteor's exhaustive real time functionality when you say that. You are also tricking would-be users who don't know any better. They will show up using your framework, have extremely limited (basically non-existent) real-time functionality, and never know what they would have missed had they looked more into Meteor.

Meteor offers a slew of real time features, propagating real time observation of the database up the stack through your webservers to your views, all functioning seamlessly with feature-packed APIs to query your data and make sure everything is kept up to date.

But I think you know this. Capitalizing on your juxtaposition next to Meteor only makes you look bad to someone that actually uses Meteor. You're trying to convince people who haven't used Meteor--and perhaps don't have much experience when it comes to real time--that Feathers is remotely close of an option if you have real time needs. It's not. And most likely a few months from now you will be using the open source--and decoupled from Meteor--Reactive GraphQL (Apollo) project they are developing as the basis for your real time functionality. Only at that point will you be able to claim your real time--but that's beside the point.

You've been around for years, and now your framework is just "a few hundred lines of code"?? That's because you're likely taking the marketing value of having been in the game for a few years (though minimal value compared to claiming you come remotely close to competing with Meteor), and using the name "Feathers" to back your latest reincarnation where your mix-n-match a hodgepodge of NPM libraries that anyone can easily do. Sorry you had to throw away a bunch of code--I know how that goes--but call it what it is instead of all this dishonesty: your latest NPM boilerplate. The newer and humbler Meatier boilerplate offers more realtime than you do!: https://github.com/mattkrick/meatier . And its author doesn't attempt to presume it's anything more than a highly useful boilerplate.

THESE GUYS (FEATHERS) HAVE NO REAL-TIME OFFERING, EVERYONE. DON'T BE FOOLED. If Real Time is what you want, these guys are not it. I find The dishonesty of their marketing unappealing and I hope anyone reading this does too. They are capitalizing on the "Meteor" name and its deep association with "real time" functionality, when in fact they are nothing like it.

Post reply on HN