Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

- dependency injection: because everything is injected, it makes writing isolated unit tests very easy. It also makes it very easy to swap functionality in and out without affecting other parts of the app.

- two-way data-binding: most of the pain of being a javascript developer comes from managing and manipulating the DOM. After using angular, there is no way I will ever use a framework that doesn't automate this tedium by providing two-way live data-binding (knockout, meteor, and ember all do this). The best part about having less DOM manipulation code is that it makes writing automated tests easier and makes those test much less brittle.

- extending HTML: this is often a main complaint of angular. People say that directives "pollute the DOM" which I find to be a strange complaint, given that HTML is a declarative (sometimes) semantic language to begin with. HTML5 added a ton of new attributes and features yet nobody complained that these new tags were "polluting HTML". Angular simply allows you to extend HTML's functionality even further, and in doing so it makes it very easy to understand what an HTML template is trying to do without having to dig through any JS code.

- testing: the angular team made testability a priority, which I was something I always really appreciated about the Rails team. If you're not writing tests for your javascript code, you need to start. Having full test coverage in both end-to-end tests and unit tests has been a major source of stability for me and my team.

So, in a way, that's great! An mental orgasm for any nerds out there. But in the real life when shit needs to get done, I'm still using everything else that sucks.

Now, before people start saying I don't know what I'm talking about, here are a few examples: - It does NOT use npm (!) -> Basically, you can't use anything without first converting it to Meteor. - It does NOT use Express (Or connect) as its base -> Basically, the standard in the Node community. That means I can't just plug-in the 20 or so awesome plugins built explicitly to be used by any kinds of node application that support connect.js - The current Asynchronous (following node's philosophy) wasn't good enough for them; so the re-created a whole new Mongo version acting synchronously.

But most importantly, it's just extremely annoying to hack with it. It's like a big black box.. you're not very sure what it does and you hope it works. But when it's not working, you can't just hack it your way or read the source. It's a little bit like Django or Rails (but in worst) as you can use SQLAlchemy in Django, or you can use different template engines, but then no project from the django community will work with your app.

The good news is, the meteor team is working hard. Maybe in a couple years it will be stable enough and iterated fast enough to provide a platform where it will be fun hacking and building web apps. But for now, I sadly prefer to stay in the "Everything else sucks" world and hack my way in the node jungle.

(For those interested, I have also tried Derby. As said in the article, it's not yet fully stable and the documentation is really Meh. But I think it's going to be big really soon and I'll be more than happy to give it another fair try. So far, I'm sticking to a basic express (Or locomotive.js which is nice.) I'm also using Angular.js on the front-end. It's something amazing as I feel very productive and it saves a tremendous amount of time.. but at other moment, I just bang my head against the table as I want to do something simple and it's just impossible so I need to use all kind of hacks to do what I'd have done in a couple lines in Vanilla Javascript. Oh well. Hard to be a hipster web developer trying all new technologies :-))

I'm ready to get on board with something cohesive that's Ember-ish whenever it matures.