Getting Meteor to 1.0

> but the issue is that I find webapps a really uninspiring trend in web development; my vision for the web is much more data-oriented than the code silos we're all making.

Can you tell me more about your vision?

There will be breaking changes as Meteor moves from 0.6.5.1 to 0.7 to 0.8 up until it reaches 1.0. This is part of the bargain of working with pre 1.0 software (APIs etc. will be stabilized once 1.0 is reached).

I have found these "breaks" are minor and usually require a few minutes to fix. That said, I also tend to lag behind by a few weeks as other in the community work through the details of the breaking changes.

Meteor Hacks (http://meteorhacks.com) and EventedMind (https://www.eventedmind.com) are two great resources.

I'm sorry, I started a reply, but after two paragraphs of rambling I had to delete it all.

If you want, I can try to form a more cogent reply later, but in a short summary, it would be keeping the current trend of sending structured data, but restoring the principles that made the web great - decoupling code from data, connecting it across services and communities (turning Hypertext into Hyperdata) and aggressively adopting standard formats.

I see a web where I don't go to Hacker News; messages come to me from everywhere, to where I want them to. Where I don't open an issue on Github, but on my personal tracker, which federates with theirs. Where businesses work for consumers, responding to their demands, instead of pushing their crap on us.

This view is mostly based on a mix of the concepts such as the Semantic Web / Linked Data, VRM, the Intention Economy and other ideas.

Well, all of Meteor is under a MIT license, so if we think we're going to "monetize that codebase" we're pretty stupid :) I'm not a lawyer but I think that under the MIT license there's basically nothing that we can do with the code that you can't do too. Our actual plan is to sell operational tools for larger companies that have mission-critical Meteor apps in production.

The incredible amount of work that we've put into JavaScript build tools over the last two years has all been with the aim of creating a radically easier, faster developer experience, because we know that that's incredibly powerful marketing for the rest of our crazy ideas. In other words, we did it because we thought that the UX of the existing JavaScript tooling was just too janky. Seriously, try Meteor for yourself and see what you think -- maybe you think our work sucks and that we wasted our time, but if so, I wish you would just tell me that (I would genuinely love to know) instead of reading ulterior motives into what was a labor of love and a ton of hard work.

Of course there are many rough edges and it's not done (that's why it's not 1.0 yet) but from people that have actually used it for a while, we actually get the opposite feedback, which is that they want us to go much further down this path, and that's why we continue to slave away at what is by far the least fun part of building a framework.

I'm totally there with you, and my hope with DDP 1 was to make some progress on that first step: decoupling code from data, so that a standard DDP client can connect to any DDP server and pull data out of it.

In the future, I'm super excited about investigating ideas like DDP discovery (asking a DDP server what data and methods it has) and description (having a DDP server publish metadata in some standard format that explains the semantics of the other data that it's publishing in terms of microformats). I think the main place we differ is that I think that these formats should use something more like a relational model rather than a hypermedia model, or a formal knowledge representation model like RDF. Isomorphisms exist between these models, and used properly they are all equally powerful, so really this just a design decision about what will be easiest to implement and adopt. And of course I believe that it has to be server push (websockets) rather than poll (HTTP), and that it has to support server-side joins (doing 1 query rather than N+1 queries, and taking 1 roundtrip rather than 2, to retrieve your newsfeed stories plus the comments on them.) I can't tell from your comment whether you agree with that or not, but like I said, these are two of the main things that motivate DDP.

All of that said, I think that by far the hardest part of the puzzle is the product design and federation issues. In your federated Github and HN, the technical work is the first 10%, the next 90% is finding a user experience for it that makes sense to and is ergonomic for a large number of real users, and the final 90% (really should be more like 9000%) is convincing the industry (read, creating incentives to force the industry) to cooperate with the federation and to resolve all of the political squabbles about advertising, control of the data, licensing, and so on. I mean, Google pulled out of XMPP federation -- all practical evidence suggests that keeping these federation together is wicked hard.

So that's why we're just trying to build the first 10% of that first 10%, which has a very clear use case for building rich browser apps and mobile apps -- and hoping that we will be a stepstool that others such as yourself can stand on to build the full solution that everyone dreams of.

Anyway, if you are sympathetic to this line of argument, I hope you'll check out DDP and see what interesting discovery and self-description features could be built on top of it, or suggest how its semantics could be strengthened!