Getting Meteor to 1.0

TL;DR: It's great for realtime apps, but not so much for the traditional web app as compared to something like RoR.

My perspective as someone who has been using it since its release. It depends on what kind of app you are building.

Coming from RoR, Meteor actually is more of a pain given that it still has edge cases that can eat developer time, especially once you dive past the initial levels of tutorials and documentation. RoR also has well established best practices and norms, unlike Meteor and perhaps Node.js as a whole. This means you will be writing a lot more boilerplate code. Meteor has some memory issues as well at times. You have to be aware of memory leaks and will frequent the profiler often, especially with large client-side applications. I've had some projects that I've worked on in Meteor hit 1GB of RAM client-side. Recent releases have been working on this, though. Live reload and hot code pushes are kind of a moot point with something like the Live Reload plugin for Sublime Text or equivalent.

For realtime applications, Meteor is a whole different beast. Realtime applications are much easier to code. I'm comparing this to making a realtime Node.js application. Meteor takes care of the boilerplate for you, pushing changes automatically to the client. It's not difficult to do something like socket.io and node.js but it is nice to have that all handled for you.

It's great for getting an application off the floor - it has a lot of that magic RoR had when it was released. Once applications get more advanced, the structure and maturity of RoR make it easier to work with. These issues are things Meteor is working on, especially in terms of stabilizing the spec/API and working on fixing the edge cases. With 1.0, it seems they are bringing some more stability to it by making it production ready. Its strengths are much more apparent in realtime applications as compared to a traditional web framework.

Edit: As compared to other node.js frameworks like Express, Meteor is much easier to work with - I probably would not go back to raw Express after Meteor. It's been moving fast to 1.0 where many of the issues I've had with it should be resolved with stability and as edge cases are resolved.

Meteor does feel a little heavy (especially when you get around to deploying it) but take a look at demeteorizer, at https://github.com/onmodulus/demeteorizer

It converts Meteor apps into more traditional node.js with a package.json

Here's an interesting project which uses DDP to talk with a Raspberry Pi: http://pijs.io/

Hope you finish soon. I am excited than for an review of meteor and derby, i think that this are the two most exciting projects at the moment.

Speaking as the protocol designer, the eventual intention for DDP is to model reactive data set publishing in a sufficiently semantic way that it can be cached by proxies. We didn't get there in pre1 and decided to not let that block Meteor 1.0, but it is the goal for the future when we have some post-1.0 breathing room (and when the Meteor community needs it.)

The idea behind DDP is that HTTP got us three huge benefits: (1) shared tooling (I can write a caching proxy, and anyone with a website can use it); (2) interchangeable parts (your client and your server can be built with totally different languages and frameworks); and (3) easy APIs (I can describe my site's REST-y API to you in a page or two). These days, a lot of sites are moving away from REST/HTTP and toward ad-hoc, custom publishing schemes that run over websockets or a HTTP long-polling transport that is emulating websockets. Since they use these ad-hoc protocols to move around data rather than something like REST, they lose (1), (2), and (3). But all of these ad-hoc protocols are basically isomorphic to each other. DDP is an attempt to nail this kernel of data publishing functionality down semantically to the point that you can get those three benefits back.

As an aside, what's the pressure that's pushing these apps away from REST? The two big ones are:

- They cache data locally and need to keep the cache fresh (say they are apps that run in your browser and never reload the page, or they are native mobile apps), and they don't want to poll for updates. And/or,

- They need to do joins and they care about latency. (When you are loading the news feed, you want to fetch the feed stories, the comments, and the userpic URLs in one round trip, not first request the stories, and then only once you have them request the comments.)

Also, many modern apps have verbs that don't map well to REST (a RPC like transferBalance affects multiple objects and doesn't map well to the idea of updating the representation of an object identified by a URL), and many modern apps need to perform some form of latency compensation (predicting the outcome of a RPC and simulating it locally to update the client's display while waiting for the server's answer, but then reverting to the authoritative outcome chosen by the server.)

DDP attempts to address these needs and run over a stream transport like websockets, while recovering some of the benefits of standardization that made REST so successful.