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What is Meteor.js?

joshowens.me

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Re: What is Meteor.js?

#41

Post by gaius »

delluminatus wrote: post #6
forrestthewoods wrote: post #2

As someone who doesn't know what Meteor.js is this doesn't actually tell me what it is, what it can do, or what it can be used for. Now to be fair I'm not a webdev so I don't much about most of these technologies nor am I really the target audience. But still. I feel like if your article is literally called "What is X" it should do a better job telling you what X is.

Meteor.js is basically Ruby on Rails for Node.js and MongoDB, plus a Javascript library for view-model binding. It's a monolithic framework for building database-backed single-page applications in 100% Javascript.

That doesn't answer the question.

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#42

Post by JeremyMorgan »

gaius wrote: post #41
delluminatus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meteor.js is basically Ruby on Rails for Node.js and MongoDB, plus a Javascript library for view-model binding. It's a monolithic framework for building database-backed single-page applications in 100% Javascript.

That doesn't answer the question.

I thought it was answered pretty succinctly.

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#43

Post by alanning »

delluminatus wrote: post #6
forrestthewoods wrote: post #2

As someone who doesn't know what Meteor.js is this doesn't actually tell me what it is, what it can do, or what it can be used for. Now to be fair I'm not a webdev so I don't much about most of these technologies nor am I really the target audience. But still. I feel like if your article is literally called "What is X" it should do a better job telling you what X is.

Meteor.js is basically Ruby on Rails for Node.js and MongoDB, plus a Javascript library for view-model binding. It's a monolithic framework for building database-backed single-page applications in 100% Javascript.

> Meteor.js is basically Ruby on Rails for Node.js and MongoDB...

As a long-time user of Meteor in production I have to say this is just about the exact opposite of how I think of Meteor. I'd encourage anyone interested to try out the simple tutorial [1] and glance over the principles behind meteor [2].

For my take on it, Meteor is great for "real-time" apps where user actions should be disseminated across a broad network quickly. It has helpful things like built-in latency compensation which make the end-user experience much nicer and the "database-on-the-client" is just glorious.

The most beautiful part of Meteor is that these features are provided for developers without us needing to make sacrifices or in most cases even change our way of coding. Latency compensation is purely controlled by whether a method is made available on both the client and server or just on the server. The client-side DB is automatically kept in sync with the actual back-end DB via a familiar pub/sub mechanism.

To me, these features (and the many others not mentioned) make Meteor much different than simply a "Ruby on Rails for Node.js".

[1] https://www.meteor.com/install [2] http://docs.meteor.com/#/basic/sevenprinciples

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#44

Post by delluminatus »

gaius wrote: post #41
delluminatus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meteor.js is basically Ruby on Rails for Node.js and MongoDB, plus a Javascript library for view-model binding. It's a monolithic framework for building database-backed single-page applications in 100% Javascript.

That doesn't answer the question.

Not if you're unfamiliar with Ruby on Rails, I guess. It's a little tricky to characterize because of how much stuff it contains. Basically it has a number of different components, that work together to make a structured environment for developing Web applications. Some of the prominent features include:

* Web server that runs on Node.js

* MongoDB integration

* Custom build tools

* Package manager (supports installing JS packages for either client-side code, server-side code, or both).

* SignalR-style remote function execution (call functions on the server from the client, and vice versa)

* JS client-side database caching

* Data binding in Javascript templates using Handlebars (or something similar, I don't remember exactly).

etc.

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#45

Post by ryanSrich »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #30

Please bear in mind while reading that this is the same author as the rather controversial 'Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails' from last year (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6642893 ) I'll repeat my thoughts from back then – Meteor is a great experiment that tries out some interesting ideas for what web apps might look like in the future. I maintain that it's absolutely not production-ready, or…

I don't even see how one could compare Rails and Meteor. They are intended to solve two very different web development problems.

Discover Meteor, the most popular book about Meteor, even uses Middleman for their blog and website - because using Meteor for something like a blog or information based site just makes no sense at all.

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#46

Post by LunaSea »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #27
kaoD wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, why use it (Node.js) on the server? Its not even that fast Not only it's still reasonably fast (21st is great, it's mostly surpassed only by C and Java), but it also has a much better ecosystem than most platforms (especially C and Java), it's faster to develop in (especially C and Java) and shares language with client side. Sharing a common codebase is very important for me. I found in most of my web project…

I agree it is reasonably fast. I don't agree its ecosystem is better than Javas, neither in size nor in quality. Same language is an advantage, so is development speed, I agree. But: C++, Java, Lua, Ur, Go, Ruby and Erlang are all faster than JS, and especially Ruby is a much nicer language. I don't hate Node.js, it has its sweet spots and the tooling feels nice and lightweight, but its not (yet) a very good general…

> I don't agree its ecosystem is better than Javas, neither in size nor in quality.

Size is a fact:

http://www.modulecounts.com/

And Ruby is definitely not faster than JavaScript.

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#48

Post by joshowens »

zigo3 wrote: post #19

An example of a sophisticated meteor app I've built to test scalability http://www.qckt.me . I've noticed some performance issues (to be fair it is running on meteor's free hosting service, however they don't set resource limits or anything like that) maybe I'll share some stats I've been collecting in the future. Like every web framework, I've run into problems. The simplicity of the server-client reactivity is keep…

Meteor.com is a horrible hosting platform, try http://modulus.io

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#49

Post by joshowens »

rezistik wrote: post #3

A couple of things really bother me about Meteor.js. One, the Atomosphere package manager site is insanely slow and buggy. Everything feels like it takes forever to render or rerender. Opening the side menu is a jaggy experience. If performance is that terrible on a super simple list of packages how terrible is it on an actually reactive site? Two, I've never seen an article on meteor that wasn't also an advertisemen…

What kind of article are you looking for? I talk about all kind of Meteor related stuff on my blog.

Don't confuse your circle of vision on twitter/hackernews/etc as a limited view of what is actually going on in the Meteor community.

Have you ever looked at a Devshop talk?

As for Atmosphere, I would love to pitch in and help but they haven't bothered to open source it yet (and sounds like they won't).

Try http://fastosphere.meteor.com/, judge speed based on that :)

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#50

Post by joshowens »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #2

As someone who doesn't know what Meteor.js is this doesn't actually tell me what it is, what it can do, or what it can be used for. Now to be fair I'm not a webdev so I don't much about most of these technologies nor am I really the target audience. But still. I feel like if your article is literally called "What is X" it should do a better job telling you what X is.

I guess I would love to hear what you are missing. I think there is a gap between your unknowing and my knowing and I tried to bring that gap a little.

I am still trying to figure out how to explain Meteor to someone brand new to web dev and would love for something more constructive from you here :)

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