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What is Meteor.js?

joshowens.me

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Re: What is Meteor.js?

#71

Post by niallobrien »

joshowens wrote: post #54
methehack wrote: post #37

Haters gotta hate. The framework is brilliant from a productivity and sheer enjoyment perspective. I don't know if it will scale; you don't either. My estimation, though, is that the team building it is very clever and super-aware of what they need to do to make the framework succeed from a scaling perspective. A lot of the comments here are spitballs from the back row of the classroom. They are willfully uninformed…

I love this comment, great job! Also, people are scaling it, we just aren't hearing about it much. I am working to correct that, these trials of scaling need to be more public right now.

Scaling Meteor is my biggest concern right now as I contemplate diving any deeper with it. I'm well aware of Mongo's oplog but the lack of Mongo sharding, the sticky session requirement, server resource consumption (RAM required per client), lack of proper offline support (last write wins) and sheer devops work required to scale is off-putting. Hopefully tomorrow's release of the remaining Bulletproof Meteor content will ease my worries. But I cannot shake the feeling that in terms of cost, something like Firebase would work out to be much more cost efficient. Also, the whole ecosystem of wrappers is plain silly. It feels like the MDG & the community are just reinventing the wheel time & time again. Oh we got Cordova support? What's that exactly other than some CLI tools? Of course any web tech should support Cordova, that's what it's built for. The Ionic Framewoek are light years ahead in this regard.

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#72

Post by rglover »

rezistik wrote: post #64
rglover wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@rezistik: I've been working on a site called The Meteor Chef for the past couple of months and think some of the stuff I've covered will give you a solid idea of Meteor's power. The focus is on implementations of features for Meteor apps in the form of "recipes," so it's much less about _why_ Meteor is cool and more of a demonstration. http://themeteorchef.com/

@rglover, I'm actually about to do a side project for a family friend. I'd really like it to be something I could do quickly. Basic crud dealing with a lot of inputs, but I want to use Postgres. What's meteor got for me? I am honestly interested, as much as the marketing edge of Meteor annoys me I'd like to believe there is some truth to some of the hype.

Here's an example of a really simple CRUD app. To give you an idea, I literally just wrote this in the last 10 minutes.

https://gist.github.com/themeteorchef/aa48a086824d9736033d

I added some inline comments to explain how everything is tied together, but if you have questions shoot me an email/gchat! ryan.glover@themeteorchef.com.

If you're looking to build a quick CRUD app, Meteor would be a great candidate.

Edit: In this example, the interaction would be when I type a taco name into the field provided and click "submit," it would immediately appear in my tacos list :)

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#73

Post by curiously »

joshowens wrote: post #52
curiously wrote: post #47

do you think Meteor.js will ever use PostgreSQL 9.4?

Yes. It is being worked on by the core team.

wow. where can I find this information?

This would be a huge selling feature for me to jump on meteor.js again. Would love to have SQL in meteor.js but again the mysterious "DDP" and it's reliability and ability to scale still remains doubtful.

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#74

Post by rezistik »

rglover wrote: post #72
rezistik wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@rglover, I'm actually about to do a side project for a family friend. I'd really like it to be something I could do quickly. Basic crud dealing with a lot of inputs, but I want to use Postgres. What's meteor got for me? I am honestly interested, as much as the marketing edge of Meteor annoys me I'd like to believe there is some truth to some of the hype.

Here's an example of a really simple CRUD app. To give you an idea, I literally just wrote this in the last 10 minutes. https://gist.github.com/themeteorchef/aa48a086824d9736033d I added some inline comments to explain how everything is tied together, but if you have questions shoot me an email/gchat! ryan.glover@themeteorchef.com. If you're looking to build a quick CRUD app, Meteor would be a great candidate. Edit:…

I do like the choice in entity to construct.

I'm open to giving it a look, but honestly I really love ES6, React and Express. I can't think of much reason to leave them anytime soon.

I've been known to be tempted. And if it really increases productivity the way the marketing claims than I can see it's use case at the company I work for as well.

My fear is kind of two fold.

One I really like the NodeJS micro-modules/micro services architecture. I like being able to consider each entity of an application it's own application. It's really easy to scale, it's really easy to completely replace portions of the application when I want to update them.

Second, I don't like 'automagic', I found both Rails and Ember really awful for me personally. I had to constantly check the documentation to understand what is expected of each layer, and there are always so many layers.

Last question if you'll continue to indulge me. I prefer functional programming to OO, since Meteor is reactive is it safe to assume it is also geared towards a functional paradigm?

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#75

Post by rezistik »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #69
rezistik wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of work really can be boiled down to CRUD though. For more advanced stuff, it's great for prototyping ideas, in fact I think that's where it really excels. It's a super simple language with a massive ecosystem, you can very easily play with ideas or start the basis of an application. Then once you've solved the business logic problems it's generally simple to move to a higher performance language.

I fully agree. Performance is not even that important, but for much of the Node.js/MongoDB hype cycle, thats what people often claimed was its biggest advantage; that "average" developers could now write servers that scale beyond what was thought to be practical. But if that isn't true, then JS has to be measured against other languages on different merits, and e.g. Ruby and Lua are just as suitable for quick prototy…

If you compare apples to apples I think the hype for NodeJS for most development is well deserved.

The fact that we are comparing static typed compiled languages like C and Java to NodeJS in order to find higher performance alternatives says a lot about it.

NodeJS isn't a replacement for those lower level languages, however when compared to other dynamic languages like PHP, Ruby, or Python it's suddenly far more competitive.

PHP is probably the main target in my opinion for Node. It's an incredibly popular language for nearly any web application use case.

http://blog.loadimpact.com/2013/02/01/node-js-vs-php-using-l...

The performance tends to favor Node over PHP. In fact, it favors NodeJS over a ton of languages in a lot of areas.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

These benchmarks really only place Java, Go and Lua above NodeJS in terms of performance.

Bundle in the ecosystem and developer productivity and it does earn the praise it received.

At the end of the day, the vast majority of developers will never need to optimize their applications past what NodeJS offers. Few of us will really deal with massive scaling issues on a day to day basis, nearly any modern language will handle the majority of applications. By the time performance is an issue it's probably time for a major refactor or rewrite building on the knowledge gained in the original version.

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#76

Post by rglover »

rezistik wrote: post #74
rglover wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example of a really simple CRUD app. To give you an idea, I literally just wrote this in the last 10 minutes. https://gist.github.com/themeteorchef/aa48a086824d9736033d I added some inline comments to explain how everything is tied together, but if you have questions shoot me an email/gchat! ryan.glover@themeteorchef.com. If you're looking to build a quick CRUD app, Meteor would be a great candidate. Edit:…

I do like the choice in entity to construct. I'm open to giving it a look, but honestly I really love ES6, React and Express. I can't think of much reason to leave them anytime soon. I've been known to be tempted. And if it really increases productivity the way the marketing claims than I can see it's use case at the company I work for as well. My fear is kind of two fold. One I really like the NodeJS micro-modules/m…

Re: functional programming, yes. Meteor is very agnostic to a specific pattern/structure, so you're able to organize your application however you see fit. There are definitely "automagic" functions that they give you, but it's more of a "box of legos" mindset than "build this model of this airplane and if all the parts aren't organized by the manual, you will fail."

You can bring your own way of thinking and work it into Meteor. The platform has conventions, for sure (e.g. client code vs. server code), but none that force you into a rigid way of writing your code.

Is that what you're asking (I'm not much of a programmers programmer so my terminology is spotty)?

Edit: give it a try, but if you have a preference for writing your apps: work with that. The marketing bullshit is just that: marketing. Meteor is great, but it's not for everyone or every application. Instead of getting caught up in the woo, it's helpful to play with it for an afternoon to see if it maps to your mental model of what an application should (or could) look like. If not, stick with what ya like :)

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#77

Post by m52go »

rezistik wrote: post #61
m52go wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible the site is just a little over-designed? I'm not sure it's fair to judge an entire full-stack framework over the front-end of a single site. I've visited Atmosphere from time to time and while performance wasn't as optimal as it could be with a less sophisticated design, it was never what I would call 'jaggy'.

Usually I would agree, but this is a website built by the team behind the framework. When you're making a tool for people to use you really need to put your best foot forward.

Atmosphere is built by Percolate Studio. I know Tom Coleman works there, but as far as I know, he's not a part of the MDG.

He should be given how good Iron Router is, but that's another issue :)

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#78

Post by yaliceme »

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…

(MDG-er here) On #2, I think you may enjoy browsing https://www.meteor.com/projects. :-) Lots of meaty technical detail on the different subprojects that make up the Meteor stack.

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#79

Post by lolwhat »

ryanSrich wrote: post #45
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.

"..or information based site.."

The entire internet is information :P but I know what you're trying to say

Re: What is Meteor.js?

#80

Post by lolwhat »

joshowens wrote: post #53
tonyjstark wrote: post #35

I programmed 2 small apps now with Meteor and my learning is that if you want to prototype something fast you can use it but if you want to have something polished afterwards then don't expect to save time by using it instead of other tools. It has its quirks...

What would you suggested or advocate instead then? I have helped publish a ton of polished Meteor apps.

could you link a few? i'm somewhat interested :)
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