14 ms·

Show HN: Meteor, a realtime JavaScript framework

1386 points by geoffschmidt 15y ago

jcarden 15y ago
Interesting. I may be in love.
Geee 15y ago
Would it be possible to set it up so that the initial page load is completely static html served from cache? The page would then be updated when it changes, i.e pushed to client and new cache. There's lots of overhead on both server and client side generating everything dynamically, especially on slow mobile clients. Testing it on fast machine on localhost creates visible delay in initial DOM update. On typical content/read-heavy pages it would make sense to always serve static pages as a fast as possible and update cache and client-DOMs on database write.
- davej 15y ago
  I agree, I want to call the Meteor framework revolutionary, but this is the one thing that's stopping me. Unfortunately, it's only suitable for web applications (i.e. not content sites) because Google can't index it and permalinks wont work in browsers that don't support push state (IE 9 and below don't support push state). In my opinion, this is the missing feature to make Meteor revolutionary in the process of web development.
- jsdalton 15y ago
  Looks like a solution for this is coming down the pipeline: http://www.meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html http://www.meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html
geoffschmidt 15y ago
Hey everyone! The four of us have been working very hard on this for the last six months, and we're excited to finally take the wraps off. Can't wait to hear what you think! We've got a lot more stuff coming over the next few months, and if there are particular things you'd like us to do/prioritize, I'd love to hear about them!
- OzzyB 15y ago
  Well, no one has mentioned anything about the awesome domain yet, so I guess I'll have to -- meteor.com -- great domain guys :)
  - gotrythis 15y ago
    Meteor is a horrible name for a programming language. Meteor's crash and burn! lol.
    - rbxbx 15y ago
      Fairly certain that they're playing off of [Comet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming))
    - nollidge 15y ago
      Actually, they tend to burn up in the atmosphere :)
  - jbigelow76 15y ago
    I was wondering how they scored that one too.
- zsherman 15y ago
  This looks awesome! Nice work guys.
- ernestipark 15y ago
  Are you guys in Boston?
  - geoffschmidt 15y ago
    We visit a lot, but we all live in the Bay area these days.
- Tloewald 15y ago
  Looks very interesting ... This or something like it seems like the obvious "other shoe" for nodejs.
rabidsnail 15y ago
"You can use the database api on the client!" Does that freak anyone else out? Where are they doing permissions checking? Who can run what database commands under what circumstances?
- dbuxton 15y ago
  From the docs (http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_collection http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_collection): "Currently the client is given full write access to the collection. They can execute arbitrary Mongo update commands. Once we build authentication, you will be able to limit the client's direct access to insert, update, and remove. We are also considering validators and other ORM-like functionality." So just for toys for the moment. Still, very cool...
  - famousactress 15y ago
    Right. But as soon as you have this ability, don't you quickly turn off insert/update? then you throttle/contain reads... So in the end, do we benefit from having a client side database connection? I'm struggling to put together a real-world use case for one that isn't irresponsible.
    - frankus 15y ago
      It seems like standard operating procedure for web apps has been to immediately throw out the user account system of whatever data store is being used and use one account with full CRUD access (or worse), with a (mediocre to disastrous) home-grown permissions system shoehorned into the controller layer. That may be because of programmer laziness or because of some sort of inherent impedance mismatch between web-scale apps and the user account system of most DBMSes, but it seems like a bad way of doing things. I think it's high time we had a web-scale data store that actually had decent per-user access control baked into it right at the model level, to the point where a sane person could trust it to live on the open internet. It seems both possible and desirable, but maybe I'm missing something.
      - 15y ago
jaredsohn 15y ago
Interesting (and smart) that they post to Hacker News a couple of days prior to the launch of Firebase (which provided the realtime functionality used by MMO Asteroids and has been active at hackathons.)
- jamest 15y ago
  (Co-founder of Firebase here) We know the Meteor guys well and are really excited about what they're building. It's very complementary. We're both advocating a new paradigm in software development and the faster it comes the better.
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  I love Firebase. We were in their preview and they were in ours. It would make a lot of sense to use Firebase as the realtime database layer behind a Meteor app. Maybe it could be as easy as "meteor add firebase" :)
chime 15y ago
Just watched the entire demo. First time I heard two people present a product together - definitely makes it a lot more interesting and much less monotonous. After the first 30seconds, I went "pfft, live reload isn't new." But I'm glad I stayed till the very end because it is indeed so much more. It looks very promising, especially if you offer app hosting of some kind (or make it easy on Heroku etc.) I am curious about the security aspect of writing to DB directly via the client but I'm sure you've thought of it. I love the 'add less', 'add coffeescript' feature. Can't wait to try this out soon.
- EdisonW 15y ago
  Yea, that was my first concern as well. Going around the typical models and straight to DB sounds dirty. :) Can't wait til I get home and try it out. Love the synchronous calls and how it synchronizes between screens, wonder how it scales up though.
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  Thanks for the feedback about the beginning of the demo. We had a really tough time with the site and the video because the people who are interested in frameworks like Meteor come from a lot of different backgrounds. Some people have written half a dozen Backbone applications and have written their own highly scalable node.js cache invalidation servers, while other people have suggested that we take the word "REST" off the homepage because it's confusing to new developers. It's tough to find a pace that holds the attention of the experienced people while not losing the people that are new to web development.
  - loceng 15y ago
    Don't shy away from opportunity to teach. Just make sure you show it as a link, perhaps that means a simple popover explaining in simple terms what REST means.
  - nacker 15y ago
    Amazing stuff! Would 'add pyjamas' (pyjs.org) be possible in future for those of us who prefer to generate their Javascript from Python?
davidcann 15y ago
Is there a built-in way to execute different code on the server, such as proprietary business logic, custom authentication, non-cross-domain APIs, etc?
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  Certainly! Take a look at Meteor.methods. That lets you define a method that the client can call without necessarily having the source. (If you give the client the source it will be able to do predictive latency compensation. But you don't have to. Or you can give the client a "stub" implementation that just inserts some placeholder records, while the server goes off and moves the forklifts around your warehouse over CORBA, or whatever.)
  - fruchtose 15y ago
    Just to hear it explicitly, does this library allow the client to call a server-side function without the end user ever seeing the source of the server-side function? That's my biggest concern, especially with the emphasis in the video on, "The client can access the DB!"
nikic 15y ago
Consider my mind blown. This is awesome.
deleted 15y ago
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tlrobinson 15y ago
Neat. Sounds a bit like Asana's Luna: http://asana.com/luna/ http://asana.com/luna/
- beggi 15y ago
  I thought so too, one of the founders was an employee of Asana.
  - tlrobinson 15y ago
    Well that explains it. Also, David Greenspan from AppJet/Etherpad.
iamjpg 15y ago
I keep picturing HackerNews being rewritten with Meteor so I can watch up-votes in realtime. Seriously though, Meteor looks incredible and I can't wait to mess around with it! Awesome work.
grayrest 15y ago
Lots of smart design choices. I have equivalent bits and pieces scattered all over the place that I've been meaning to put together to get the "wow" that this package delivers. Kudos for actually making it happen.
beggi 15y ago
This looks extremely interesting, and reminds me a bit of Lunascript (http://asana.com/luna/ http://asana.com/luna/). I'm very interested in who is paying for the development? I notice that there's no big tech company behind this and from the contact page I can see Meteor Development Group has an office in downtown San Francisco. So do you have any info on what the plan is regarding monetization?
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  Well, I am one of the Meteor devs, and I used to work at Asana :) Luna is an astonishing codebase, and Meteor is a small fraction of it in sophistication and functionality. But we think there's room for a lighter weight framework for the masses. Monetization: We're still figuring that out. For now, we just want to see what people do with it. We think a lot about companies like redhat and mysql, and how they have been successful while building open ecosystems.
luigi 15y ago
This feels to me a lot like how Rails felt back in 2005. A fundamental leap forward and an understanding of where web technology is going. I haven't felt that way about Node.js or even its higher-level frameworks like Express or Batman. This feels like "The One", even though I've been absorbing the docs and screencasts only for the last 20 minutes.
- kgosser 15y ago
  Completely agree. I thought Backbone was the "missing piece", but this really is it. Edit: to clarify I specifically meant a front-end tool to help me leap a level in personal development skill.
  - alttab 15y ago
    In my gut I was thinking "Great, another JS framework." I watched the video and was very impressed. And I consider myself a server guy.
  - cfontes 15y ago
    I am sorry but there is no way to compare backbone with this one( but it looks very nice, too ), they aim at different things. I am using backbone for a while and it's backend agnostic which is great ! This one have more resemblance to knockout.js( I am talking client side) and it's MVVM design, backbone doesn't even try to approach that problem.
    - kgosser 15y ago
      Very true. I wasn't very explicit that I didn't mean they were the same thing, apples to apples. I meant "missing piece" in terms of the front-end tool to help me leap a level.
  - jguimont 15y ago
    Backbone is almost at the top of the javascript toolkit levels. Let's put it in perspective: - backbone - jquery - meteor <- the low level of the high level :) You use meteor as a foundation to build your application as backbone is more or less your application itself. Think "CoreFoundation" vs "AppKit" kind of difference.
flav0ur 15y ago
Great. I'm sure realtime web frameworks will be the future of node.js and the entiry web itself. However, I do have some concerns. Opening my Databse via the web? Neeh, this is one thing not clear in the video. P.S.: You should provide your cli via npm. Go and register the name before someone else do. (It's not taken currently http://search.npmjs.org/#/meteor http://search.npmjs.org/#/meteor)
kilowatt 15y ago
Cool stuff! Really like the template handler that "notices" which attributes you're interested in and registers listeners for you. Is that implemented with a proxy "this?" or with actual Javascript parsing? gulp Any reason the GitHub link isn't above the fold? That's the first thing I looked for... I'd also be curious to know if any of the live reloading stuff was inspired by Brett Victor's "Inventing on Principle?" Something about tools that let you create "live" seems to be in the air.
md224 15y ago
Wasn't there a Backend-as-a-Service platform released recently for use with Backbone.js? Does anyone remember what that was? Seems like we're seeing a new wave of "front-end only" application frameworks coming out... EDIT: oh yeah, Backlift! (http://www.backlift.com http://www.backlift.com) This is definitely an interesting trend.
defeated 15y ago
The live demo is here: http://colors.meteor.com/ http://colors.meteor.com/ Seems to have a minor glitch with unicode characters? When you do Colors.remove() everything goes away, but the entries with unicode all come back? Somewhat strange... Interesting tech, but db access from the client scares me to no end, call me a curmudgeon I guess.
- shashashasha 15y ago
  Performance on that url also seems to be super slow right now with a lot of people hitting it. Curious to see how Meteor handles loads, it's really exciting stuff.
  - defeated 15y ago
    I think that someone might've gotten clever and done something like, while (true) { Colors.insert(...); } On a related note, they took it down now.
wicknicks 15y ago
Wow! This is amazing. Though not entirely new, I love the idea of syncing database content with web content. They seem to have gotten it right!
equark 15y ago
Is GPL really viable for a web framework? The Free Software Foundation has consistently held that linking to GPL code (not LGPL) is derived work.
- skore 15y ago
  [[citation needed]]. From what I remember, the FSF is pretty consistent in saying that deriving from GPL code is derived work. If your linking constitutes a derivation (a common example would be a database handler that you adapt to your application after you've loaded it) then it is a derivation. If you just loosely call it, it is not.
  - aaronblohowiak 15y ago
    Golden, Bernard (2005), "Chapter 3. Open Source Risks", Succeeding with Open Source, Addison-Wesley, p. 44, ISBN 9780321268532 You appear to be confusing GPL with the "GPL With Linking Exception" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception
    - skore 15y ago
      It is possible for a piece of software to rely on the output of another piece of software without being derivative. Hell, that's basically how any interface in the world works. As the wikipedia article on the GPL notes, the problem is not so much the GPL, but how derivative work is not that well pinned down in copyright law itself. That it appears ambiguous in the GPL is a result of that. My rule of thumb is to approach it from the angle of "what is the software worth if you take out what is linked?" - If the software can function without the linked code, it may not be derivative, but the actual question is whether it is useful without the linked code. Whether it carries out the tasks that the user needs the software for without the linked code. To me, it's more of a social question of how much the linkee is indebted to the linked. So no, I don't think I am confusing the two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lin...
  - 15y ago
swah 15y ago
So many projects these days, I wish they had simple metadata like Stackparts projects: meteor - Is a: webframework - Depends on: node.js - Comparable to: backbone.js knockout.js rails django - Connects: ....
jonny_eh 15y ago
I predict we'll see "Looking for Meteor.js developers, minimum 5 years experience" ads in the next 6 months.
- mathiasrw 15y ago
  Would love it :)
delano 15y ago
This is a very uncool way to install something: $ curl install.meteor.com | /bin/sh
- Kiro 15y ago
  Why is it uncool?
  - delano 15y ago
    You're running a script that you've never seen on your machine with your user account. It's a dangerous habit at best. At worst you're exposed to poor code and man-in-the-middle attacks. As someone else pointed out, it also makes versioning difficult.
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  I am to blame for that. Here is our thinking on it: - Though it "feels wrong" (definitely with you there), is it really any different from downloading an installer package and running it? - You can just go to install.meteor.com in your browser if you want to see what the script does (or just leave off the | sh), which is arguably better than other installation mechanisms. Curious to hear people's thoughts :)
  - collinjackson 15y ago
    How about making it https://install.meteor.com https://install.meteor.com?
  - moe 15y ago
    I'm chiming in here because it may still be early enough to stop you. Do. Not. Require. Root. Not optionally, not sometimes, not "maybe". NEVER. Your universe is ~/.meteor. Do not even think about touching anything outside that. It's taboo. You clearly know what you're doing otherwise, so please get this one right from the start and save yourselves a lot of headache later on (cf. npm). Install to ~/.meteor and provide the user with a small snippet to paste to their ~/.bash_profile ("source ~/.meteor/magic.sh").
DancingWolf 15y ago
It was a few years since I was "in" with the new things happening in the web-world. But how did JavaScript come to be the new "cool" language? It got some horrible problems with object oriented stuff, some really strange bugs/features, and it's slow-ish. I liked making cool stuff with JavaScript, but compared to something like ruby isn't this a step backwards? I can see the advantages of this framework, but it still seems wonky.
- cwsaylor 15y ago
  Grab a copy of "Javascript: The Good Parts". It's a short read and goes over the parts of JS that don't suck.
  - kika 15y ago
    And then try coffeescript which just isolates you from the parts which do suck :-)
- exogen 15y ago
  Ubiquity is one reason. Ultimately, the "horrible problems" and "strange bugs" just turned out to be "unfamiliar differences." Also, newer JavaScript runtimes (V8) tend to smoke other dynamic languages in speed tests: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang... – so it's not "slow-ish" so much as "really, really fast." ;)
- mcantelon 15y ago
  >it's slow-ish. Not compared to Ruby. ;) >I liked making cool stuff with JavaScript, but compared to something like ruby isn't this a step backwards? http://fingernailsinoatmeal.com/post/292301859/metaprogramming-ruby-vs-javascript http://fingernailsinoatmeal.com/post/292301859/metaprogrammi...
nicklovescode 15y ago
Very impressed
joshmlewis 15y ago
Why do none of the linked demos work? :/
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- Leftium 15y ago
  The demo links are randomly generated. The links are preceded by instructions to set up your own demos at these unique sub-domains.
mcmire 15y ago
I'll have to think of a use for this, but this definitely seems really interesting. I think working to make building web apps easier and faster is an awesome mission, so mad props to you guys, looking forward to see where this project goes.
atjoslin 15y ago
This is awesome :D
hbrundage 15y ago
Congrats to the Meteor team: it looks amazing. Questions: - What's browser support like? - Do you do synchronous AJAX to return results synchronously for DB operations on the client? It looked like newly created records' IDs were returned as soon as the creation code was executed. - How do you track a reactive function's dependencies? - Do you plan to make a run loop similar to Ender's to stage and order various recalculations and DOM updates?
ericingram 15y ago
One question: How did you get a hold of Meteor.com?
bryanh 15y ago
Big props on stellar presentation. The code is impressive, but even better is their slick install, deploy, docs, screencast and examples. This looks big. If nothing else, hopefully others will notice the code to support materials ratio. Its just as relevant for straight OS as much as it is for "businesses around GPL".
- munaf 15y ago
  Agreed. What struck me most was how much care they put into the presentation of the framework, docs, and videos. I'm really happy to see so many developers taking UX seriously, even if it's just for other developers. Quite a nice trend I'm seeing with libraries/frameworks these days.
joshontheweb 15y ago
Very cool, this feels like the natural evolution of the realtime web. I am fearful that there could be too much 'magic' though. Have to play with it before I pass judgement.
zenocon 15y ago
Looks nice. There are a handful of similar frameworks out there (e.g now.js http://nowjs.com/ http://nowjs.com/, socketstream https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream)...the trend seems to be toward heavy use of sockets in webapps. I'm developing with socketstream right now, and I love it. I hope they are all successful.
- juliennakache 15y ago
  Love SocketStream too. I'll be exploring Meteor to see the differences :)
pirateking 15y ago
I love Coffeescript and Backbone, but was on the fence about trying to build a Javascript only app using Node.js on the server. This looks a bit more interesting to me as it seems like a truly modern web framework, that may actually make web development fun again. Freaking love the name too (admittedly a non-trivial factor to me when deciding whether to investigate new technologies).
gridspy 15y ago
I really like the look of Meteor. We're currently building the next version of our dashboards for Gridspy (http://www.gridspy.co.nz/ http://www.gridspy.co.nz/). It would rock to have a solid real-time library at the core. For us it needs to support our live data feeds, inter-operate nicely with our PostgreSQL db (via our own API?) and if possible take advantage of our existing django application. Our rendered dashboards need to be seamless and fast. I've been leaning towards highly cached static data to ensure this.
charlieok 15y ago
Is there a blog with an RSS and/or Atom feed? That's how I generally try to stay in the loop on these things...
sleight42 15y ago
I had two knee jerk reactions. The first has been discussed already (client side DB access). The second has not. Does Meteor have any opinions on testing? I didn't see anything from a quick glance at the docs. I love the idea of tighter development cycles. But as a Meteor app grow in size and complexity, won't it still need a test suite to prevent regressions? Eager to hear thoughts on this from the Meteor devs.
- amirhhz 15y ago
  That puzzled me, too, I started browsing the code and noticed there's not a lot of testing of the project code itself: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/tests https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/tests So I agree, it would be good to hear from the devs about their opinions and thoughts on testing. (Is there a chance that they think the "realtime-by-default" approach lessens the need for testing?) I'm no testing zealot, but I've found writing tests useful and it would be a shame to be frustrated by that missing piece in an otherwise great project.
  - davej 15y ago
    http://www.meteor.com/faq/meteor-is-a-early-preview http://www.meteor.com/faq/meteor-is-a-early-preview
  - debergalis 15y ago
    We've actually written a lot of testing for the core framework packages -- those tests are in each package directory. Look for *_test.js files. https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages/ https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages/ You're 100% right though. We don't have a fully baked story yet for application level testing. It's something we're trying to push forward as soon as we can.
    - sleight42 15y ago
      Cool. Thanks for clearing that up. Don't get me wrong: I want to like Meteor. But I've found automated tests too important to my workflow to live without.
follower 15y ago
It would be helpful if the phrase "simple DDP protocol" on the home page linked to a description of said protocol. :)
sbarre 15y ago
Just watching the screencast and reading through the API for an hour or so is giving me real ideas for practical projects that I would never have tried before because of the sheer amount of "plumbing" required, but Meteor provides it already.
silverlight 15y ago
This is very neat. I've been using Backbone + ShareJS[1] to do a lot of similar things for a current app I'm building. This is certainly nicer, though, with concepts like latency correction and support for keeping the user's changes in place whenever a template updates by only updating the specific elements that change (very cool). A couple of questions for you: 1) What's the current and projected goal in terms of concurrency for the server? Is this going to be able to handle thousands of simultaneous connections? Is the Node server built on anything else like Socket.IO, or is it fully new and unique code? 2) How does this handle conflicts? ShareJS implements Operational Transformation[2] to attempt to smartly handle conflicting writes from multiple clients (used in Google Wave, for example). Does this just do a simple timestamp-based overwrite? If so, how far down the tree? I'm not familiar with MongoDB (sorry), but would it be at the object level? Or the property level? [1] http://sharejs.org http://sharejs.org [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation
- guscost 15y ago
  It looks like David Greenspan (the guy who created EtherPad and then got hired by Google to work on Wave) is on the team so it's probably safe to assume that OT is a feature.
  - silverlight 15y ago
    A very good point :-). Just wanted to know what their "official" word is, since I didn't read about it in the docs... EDIT: I see that they mention OT on the people page: http://www.meteor.com/about/people http://www.meteor.com/about/people, so excuse my ignorance about the people behind the work...
    - guscost 15y ago
      Well you got me to read the whole Wiki page, that counts for something. And it's a feature to be pretty excited about!
benrahn 15y ago
For a not-full-time developer like me (I've picked up bits and pieces here and there) Meteor might just blow the doors open on what's within reach of my prototyping abilities. (Full disclosure: I'm friends with most of the Meteor crew, very excited to see the wrapping come off!)
ph0rque 15y ago
Somehow, I feel that these guys are a YC company, but don't want to reveal it yet.
- tstyle 15y ago
  That would explain Garry Tan's photo and endorsement on the front page : )
flexterra 15y ago
Looks like the future
speg 15y ago
Looks cool! How will it fair if I try to make a mobile app via PhoneGap or similar?
keeptrying 15y ago
Does it scale to really heavy javascript pages? Do you have any benchmarks on when it starts to breakdown in terms of performance? Also have you built a "solid" production app with it?
- mathiasrw 15y ago
  http://www.meteor.com/faq/meteor-is-a-early-preview http://www.meteor.com/faq/meteor-is-a-early-preview
chrismealy 15y ago
"In Meteor, your server code runs in a single thread per request, not in the asynchronous callback style typical of Node." So node's not a cancer now?
- bbayer 15y ago
  +1, what about performance? Does this mean all server will be blocked while doing IO?
  - alexmic 15y ago
    No, it says one thread per request, not single-threaded.
    - bbayer 15y ago
      sorry. missed that one. Again, I believe multi-threading is not best approach in terms of scalability. Asynchronous io is the secret sauce of node and it distinguishes node from other server side technologies. I think, asynchronous nature doesn't suite well to meteor's approach. I will be appreciated to learn real reason.
  - benmmurphy 15y ago
    I thought they were using fibers (https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers) so much more scalable than threads but slightly worse performance than callbacks
yangez 15y ago
This looks amazing - great job. As an aside, it's amusing when you View Source and just see an empty HTML file.
yakko 15y ago
why is http://http://colors.meteor.com/ http://http://colors.meteor.com/ timing out?
deleted 15y ago
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wavephorm 15y ago
Their docs server isn't up, but I'm wondering about all the low-level stuff that I have to deal with every day. Where do I put my files, how can I compress them, does it generate ETAGs correctly, how do I create cookies, and sessions....? Having a way to inject changes into the client solves only a slice of what you do while creating a modern app. Will this framework be just that slice?
javert 15y ago
Can't people find an alternative to the world "realtime" that hasn't already been used for 30 years to mean something entirely different? (As in, real-time systems, real-time operating systems, etc.) I'm not trying to put down Meteor, I imagine it's great.
- dreamdu5t 15y ago
  Agreed. I prefer the term "auto-synchronizing" rather than "real-time."
GutenYe 15y ago
It remembers me of emberjs
level09 15y ago
Brilliant idea, I believe that HTML5 local storage will never work and perform well. these guys brought mongoose APIs to the client, this will bring along unlimited potential and possibilities.
deleted 15y ago
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yan 15y ago
Geoff & Co, this is wonderful! (Not sure if you remember, but I met you in SF at one point a few years ago and we wandered around the downtown talking for a little bit. Was actually just wondering what you were up to)
tlear 15y ago
This feels like something big or perhaps something that will inspire something big. But you could probably avoid the database query straight in the client a distraction from an awesome presentation.
firefoxman1 15y ago
The live code update without the server restarting is really intriguing. What package is responsible for that?
chrisherring 15y ago
What's the roadmap for supporting windows? I tried to install meteor using cygwin and hit "Sorry, this OS is not supported yet.".
- chrisherring 15y ago
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10108840/meteor-and-windows http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10108840/meteor-and-windo...
daraosn 15y ago
I loved this project, nice job... just wondering, what if I want to protect my DB so people cannot change it through the browser console as shown in the video? (also this example http://colors.meteor.com/ http://colors.meteor.com/)
treetrouble 15y ago
This is the first use of server-side js that has made a lick of sense to me as anything other than an experiment. I think in terms of security and flexibility the API may wind up being a lot more complex than it is now. Maturity aside, clearly an excellent idea and work so far...
polychrome 15y ago
Great work! I have to ask, I know that Mongo is all the rage these days, but how quickly could you add MySQL support? I can already see several uses for this, but I need to tie into legacy systems. In terms of security (say a dashboard), could you just disable the system from being able to modify the DB and just read it?
erichocean 15y ago
Pairing Meteor with Blossom[1] would basically close the loop on writing high-performance mobile HTML5 apps. (Blossom recently went full native on mobile -- the platform runtimes are no longer needed.) [1] https://github.com/fohr/blossom https://github.com/fohr/blossom
- hbrundage 15y ago
  Can you expand on this? To me it seems like Meteor accomplishes the same thing as Blossom, on the web platform at least, except that it does HTML /templating instead of rendering to a canvas. I bet it would be hard to reconcile the two different frameworks ideas of what Observable or Subscriber/Subscription looks like as well.
  - erichocean 15y ago
    AFAICT, Meteor solves a different problem: eliminating the server-side of writing a JavaScript single-page application. The auto-updating template stuff is cute, but unless your goal is apps that max out around the complexity of a todo list, there's a ton of performance pitfalls (c.f. Ember.js), especially in mobile browsers. A lot of apps are that simple though, so I don't want to knock Meteor (or Ember) here -- that's a useful niche to be in and anything that makes development faster/easier is great! A Blossom app would simply use the server capabilities and data updating stuff in Meteor, but in the context of a normal, high-performance Blossom-based mobile UI with statecharts, hardware-accelerated surfaces and animation, and yes, GPU-accelerated Canvas rendering (although Blossom now supports old-style HTML/CSS views as well). Mobile apps written with Blossom have virtually the same amount of resource control as a native iOS app, and to my knowledge, is the only mobile app framework with 100% JavaScript controls that can say that. (Appcelerator's Titanium is the other way to go – wrap the native controls with a JavaScript API.) Not to mention the ability to run on Android and iOS browsers from the same code base, or deploy via PhoneGap, or target desktop browsers or tablets with effectively native performance. Meteor is really neat, I did something similar to at least the data syncing part two years with a tech I developed called HubSync, which kept a SproutCore datastore in sync across clients. The net effect was the same -- no server code, data stays in sync automatically, and you only ever dealt with the client API. (It could do a few other things, like still function offline, and was also shared nothing on the server side with Cassandra or BigTable -- I've seen serious problems with Mongo scaling in the past (yay, global lock!), and I have no idea what the offline story is for Meteor.) But still, very cool tech overall, and the team looks like they've got some great ideas. Bravo!
cfontes 15y ago
Do you plan to charge for it at some point? because for me it's not clear. Is there a business model or just releasing it for people to use in their business and if improved contribute back ? Because I cannot see anyone adopting it without those questions answered. Anyway, nice thing you guys have build... keep it going !
aba_sababa 15y ago
I would love have all my node packages available to me...in the meantime, HTTP requests from the server would be much appreciated
norviller 15y ago
Why choose Mongo as the default Data store? Redis anyone?
zach 15y ago
Anyone want to speculate on the difficulty level of integrating Meteor with Cappuccino? That combination seems like it could be spectacular, if it's at all possible.
avelis 15y ago
I know the install script is fairly easy but will this support installs via the homebrew package manager?
xxpor 15y ago
One comment on the screencast, isn't encouraging people to do curl $URI | sh a really bad idea?
- beaumartinez 15y ago
  No. You can have the same confidence it's legit as when you download an installer and run that. The bonus here is that you can load $URI and read the source before you even run it.
  - xxpor 15y ago
    Right, I guess I was just thinking of the opposite direction. Usually I download something, look at it (more to see how it works, not security, but I digress) and then sh it.
rdl 15y ago
Congratulations -- I'd talked to you guys about what you were working on, but it looks like it's much more awesome than I thought.
CWIZO 15y ago
Note that the name "Meteor" is already used: http://meteorserver.org/ http://meteorserver.org/ it's a comet server, so there might be some confusion here (I thought that this was the next version of meteor I linked to, at first). Other then that: "holy shit" was the first thing that popped into my head after watching 2 minutes of the video. Excellent work guys!
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dclowd9901 15y ago
Thanks for the trouble you guys have caused me. I'm gonna have to hose-whip my co-founder to keep this out of our project until it's mature enough.
angelohuang 15y ago
Could someone explain how it could work with Firebase?
jalada 15y ago
The whole Meteor website just refreshed for me while I was watching the screencast. Did they just push something? ;) Edit: And now it's down. Thundering herd?
gsharma 15y ago
I got very excited after watching that video. Meteor does a great job at hitting a lot of things a new web framework requires. However, I then viewed the source on meteor.com. It includes just a javascript and everything else is in that Javascript file. Are all the apps going to be like this or just how they roll? Putting the HTML markup in a Javascript file not just breaks crawlers[1] (they are not indexed by Google) but also (I guess) not accessible to all sorts of users/browsers. [1]: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/echo?q=http%3A%2F%2Fmeteor.com%2F https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/echo?q=http%3...
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  Meteor developer here -- we think it's super important to be able to serve static HTML when the situation calls for it (eg, crawlers.) Our architecture is designed to do this but we haven't had a chance to implement it yet. We have a lot of incentive to get to it soon, because it's no fun to be left out of Google :) There's a bit more in the FAQ. Our approach is based on rendering the template as a string (it doesn't require building a DOM tree on the server and then serializing it.) http://meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html http://meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html
  - gsharma 15y ago
    Good to see that you are aware of this and working towards it. I'll keep an eye out for it, won't be able to use Meteor before that.
enobrev 15y ago
Very cool implementation, and fantastic site and video! I grabbed the source to see what it would take to write a mysql plugin. As far as I can tell, it's fairly well tied into mongodb[1]. It seems this would benefit a great deal if the minimongo package[2] had some sort of interface to build to for custom data sources. I would love to add mysql-livedata, and a mini-sql of sorts. Or maybe even a simple mini-orm with basic insert / update / delete / select methods and a more advanced "WHERE" syntax (SQL cousin to minimongo's selector magic). Obviously the real magic is in the livedata synchronization. Regardless, this is very impressive. Thanks for putting this together! 1: As far as I can tell, the server won't even run without Mongo, at least according to this in server.js: `throw new Error("MONGO_URL must be set in environment")` 2: An incredibly cool browser-based implementation of the mongodb query api
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  Yeah, there still a few places where Mongo is hardcoded (the prototype assumed Mongo everywhere, and we've gradually factored out these assumptions.) Most of these places have to do with the code that automatically starts mongod for you when you type 'meteor' to run your app in development mode. I think all of the database assumptions have been factored out of livedata, but we'll only know for sure once we have a second database packaged :) And yes a second time: to package a sql database, you would ideally have a 'minisql', a client-side cache with a sql-compatible interface. It's not strictly necessary though. There's no reason a DDP[1] dataset couldn't use a different database API on the client and the server (say, sql on the server, mongo on the client), but if you did this and you wanted latency compensation, you'd have to write all of your methods twice, once against each API. I am really excited about having sql support, but we tried really hard to defer anything that wasn't absolutely necessary for release :) [1] DDP is the protocol that livedata speaks between the client and the server. In Meteor, the client and the server mostly keep themselves at arm's length. The client doesn't know that the server is made with Meteor, just that it speaks DDP, and vice versa.
eliaskg 15y ago
First of all, the project is great! I think many of us have always dreamed of developing for the web in this way. I also think they have to try to solve the "API Problem" at some point. Mobile apps are native and they will remain native for some time. Nobody wants to implement a web app with Meteor and re-write an API in a traditional manner. But nevertheless this is a very interesting piece of work and I am thrilled to hear about updates!
melpomene 15y ago
How is security handled here when it seems like the client can write freely to the database? Are there any restrictions?
- usamec 15y ago
  there are no restrictions so far :)
keeptrying 15y ago
A big part of the problem is building the community. Ie the right license and creating a core group that's more than just the employees of one company. The tech looks great but I think the community is key for this to be adopted rather than anything else. Rails nailed the community aspect and that's a big reason to its success.
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neebz 15y ago
woha. this looks like what I build using Nowjs and Knockoutjs. (https://github.com/neebz/Real-Time-Notice-Board https://github.com/neebz/Real-Time-Notice-Board) plus mongodb access. Great stuff.
antihero 15y ago
How do you handle authentication and authorization in real-world apps?
Jebus 15y ago
GPL?! I don't even..
micheljansen 15y ago
My first impression of this: wow. If Meteor is all it appears to be, this is nothing short of revolutionary. My second reaction: what happens when the magic ends? When I was new to Rails, I really loved how easy it was to get started with scaffolding, a nice DSL for specifying relations, nifty form helpers. However, the first time I veered a little off the golden path and wanted to do something a little more complicated (that was not supported by the form helpers at that time), I ran into a huge wall. I found out that I actually had no idea how Rails worked. The magic had hidden all complexity from me before, and now the magic failed me and I didn't know where to start doing it on my own. Rails has matured a lot since then (it also dropped some of the magic in favor of more explicit behavior) and my understanding of the framework has grown with it. Meteor looks even more magic to me. There is so much stuff happening. What if I plan to do a lot of dynamic updates and I want to defer live-updating because I am doing mass-updates? What if I need a hard division between client/server code? What if I want to share the backend with an iOS app or something? Can I use this to build an API? The documentation does not yet fully answer these questions for me.
- danmaz74 15y ago
  This was my first concern too. I didn't have time to study the documentation, but I hope it is easy to integrate custom solutions both around and on top of the magic whenever it's necessary.
- csomar 15y ago
  I can't upvote this enough. When I saw the screencast, I said "Good,we are looking for that". But I want to know how this work, and how I can hack the core. At some point of building my app, I'll need finer degree of control.
  - Lambent_Cactus 15y ago
    The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/meteor/meteor https://github.com/meteor/meteor
- entropy_ 15y ago
  Joel Spolsky coined a term for this type of problem. The "leaky abstraction". See here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
tete 15y ago
Looks interesting, but.. $ curl install.meteor.com | sh Unable to install. Meteor supports RedHat and Debian. Installation failed. However the slow start description in their README works fine. Maybe this should be mentioned in the message above? https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/README.md Looks like an interesting approach. I always thought SocketStream would be the next big thing, but now I am uncertain. Nice that there are a number of frameworks though! :) http://www.socketstream.org/tour http://www.socketstream.org/tour Oh, a CoffeeScript would be nice.
- kodablah 15y ago
  I still think SocketStream is the next big thing. The 0.3 release is moving along well and I have had fantastic success with it. The features touted by Meteor seem to already exist in SocketStream (template choice, server/client push/pull, DB choice) besides the "no server code part". It also works very well on Windows of course.
  - zenocon 15y ago
    I've been building a SocketStream app for a couple weeks now, and this was my thought too -- plus it has other, important stuff done (e.g. authentication/authorization is working/sync'd up between http and sockets). Meteor has some nice packaging and deploy stuff and the hosting is nice, but that to me is a nice-to-have.
- tete 15y ago
  Nice, there is a reaction from SocketStream on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833096
alexro 15y ago
I'm at risk of sounding offensive, but I don't mean it. I just want to point out that to me many recent accomplishments in the realm of web frameworks sound similar to how Microsoft was making noise back in the day with their frameworks. The MS frameworks were great in themselves, they even cooperated somewhat. But they ultimately lacked in the ability to support long-term development, you know, when people just drop out of the project and you suddenly need to bring someone in ASAP. Keeping this in mind will allow the new generation of "web guys" do better than us, the "desktop guys".
j0hnlucas 15y ago
Going through the examples now. This is blowing my mind. Excellent job guys!!!
erjjones 15y ago
If this is what it says it is ... then it will rival Rails for sure.
darylteo 15y ago
Hi Geoff, something I've been wondering: how can Meteor help prevent race conditions? For example, if there is a lengthy piece of text (say a blog post) being edited by > 1 person. Can Meteor simply lock a resource and prevent edits on client-side or is this something that needs further tweaking by the developer? Or will it somehow have Google Docs style collaborative editing? Regards, daryl
jameswyse 15y ago
This is.. Awesome! I've been using node.js for a while and I think I've tried all of the different frameworks, none of them seemed quite right.. I eventually settled on using express and building on top of it with modules and my own code. When I installed the leaderboard example I expected a big directory with a million files.. my jaw dropped when I saw the whole app was 3 files! And app.js was tiny! This looks like the node framework we've all been waiting for. I really can't wait until this is more polished so I can actually use it for live apps. Great job guys, bravo!
villagefool 15y ago
Trying to read your docs and examples to figure what is in the framework (Leaderboard is a Meteor object?) and how it works. An image showing the sequence/flow of data between client/server/framework/and user code, would of helped a lot.
mikecaron 15y ago
Can't wait to deploy my first meteor app on Heroku!
skeptical 15y ago
This is what I've waiting for. Knockout, backbone, spine et al gave a glimpse of what html frontend development would be in the future. The future is here now. Cool. I'll drink a beer because of this. EDIT: please... couchdb support for over the top awesomeness.
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mkmcdonald 15y ago
So, has anyone actually read the code? I'd guess that these guys have spent a maximum of one month writing JavaScript. It's a giant mess. All flash, no substance.
- Raynos 15y ago
  Agreed, the codebase is a mess. The ideas are nice, the implementation is absolutely horrible.
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hk_kh 15y ago
I have typed a (lame) version of the installer compatible with archlinux (through dpkg) https://raw.github.com/gist/2360250/a5d101386590a17fed026c7b07725d53f296dbde/install-meteor.sh https://raw.github.com/gist/2360250/a5d101386590a17fed026c7b... EDIT: didn't see https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=24167 https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=24167 ...
- deleted 15y ago
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Metapony 15y ago
Ha! I was watching the example just now, and got a sudden grey screen http error -- "No data received"
goldmab 15y ago
Shouldn't this page be more clear about the fact that this completely insecure and not currently suitable for any public website, due to the unlimited database rights?
vishl 15y ago
What are the client-side performance implications? I am worried about running this on mobile clients (mobile web or within phonegap). Three things in particular: 1. Running complex DB queries on the client 2. The in-memory database cache described in the documentation using a lot of memory 3. Having little control over how often the client hits the server and vice versa.
tent1 15y ago
At first face it looks a genius idea, but the more I think about it the less convinced I am about it all. It seems as though it has combined automatic polling and asynchronous updating together, and has removed traditional controllers and models. Yeah, it's cool out of the box and yeah, it's great for scaffolding and rapid development. But really, it seems like another stack to learn and completely depend upon, and with codebase that 'liquid' it seems like it's much riskier than doing things traditionally. I'd be worried that it auto-injects into the running app. Don't get me wrong — it's amazing. But what's the real, actual benefit here?
erikpukinskis 15y ago
I'm surprised no one is talking about the glaring hole, which is security. It's apparently on the developers' short list of high priority features (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10100813/data-validation-and-security-in-meteor http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10100813/data-validation-...) but it doesn't seem like a trivial addition. With client-side DB access, and eventual consistency baked into the platform as a core feature, you can't just throw "if current_user == object.owner" in your controller and call it a day. I'd love to know what they're thinking here. Certainly you could go with a row-level security scheme like CouchDB has, where you attach little javascript snippets to your database that check security. But then how does the client verify? Maybe you can just assume that only malicious users will ever bump into security problems and so client-side verification is unnecessary. If auth is baked into the framework, then maybe they can give you basic row-level security for free by maintaining a user table with auth tokens that's only accessible on the server side, and passing the auth token along with every database request, and maintaining a meteor-controlled owner key on objects. But that doesn't help if your security checks are more involved. I.e.: "if object.owner.friends.includes?(current_user)". I'd love to hear what they're planning for this.
- upinsmoke 15y ago
  From the doc: "Currently the client is given full write access to the collection. They can execute arbitrary Mongo update commands. Once we build authentication, you will be able to limit the client's direct access to insert, update, and remove. We are also considering validators and other ORM-like functionality."
  - erikpukinskis 15y ago
    Yeah, I read that too. :) It doesn't really address my questions about how they'll pull that off.
    - shimonamit 15y ago
      I would assume their client DB stubs invoke server RPCs. A few server hooks for your webapp would solve that.
fascinated 15y ago
#fuckyeah geoff!
cslarson 15y ago
This looks like it has some similarities to Derby (http://derbyjs.com/ http://derbyjs.com/) and SocketStream (http://socketstream.org/ http://socketstream.org/). Will be interesting to see with authentication and permission handling.
iamleppert 15y ago
How are they delivering a result back from those async mongo function calls right away on the client? Anyone know??
mcgwiz 15y ago
I wonder how much money they burned to get that domain name. Overall, this seems to be a production that feels much glossier and slicker than other technology "debuts". Is this the new way to launch a technology? Razzle and dazzle the programmer into the latest cargo cult... :/
buster 15y ago
reads like socketstream
devs1010 15y ago
Weird how this just came out a day ago as I've been starting to learn node and I was just trying to figure out a way to blend backbone with node so that I could re-use models server-side. I saw this yesterday on the front page but didn't pay much attention to it and then today I remembered seeing it and came back to it and it looks like it solves the issue I had been trying to figure out myself. All the examples, etc I could find on combing backbone and node seemed half-baked and I couldn't find an easy to follow example for a beginner, its as if this came to the surface just in time.. I am definitely going to give it a try
kelvin0 15y ago
I think this is a great idea, however I still am still adamant to use Javascript. The framework is a great step in the right direction, and is quite an evolution from something like Google Gears. I would love to use this framework if it was implemented as Google's NaCL, running 'native' code instead of Javascript.
it 15y ago
This looks similar to another project being worked on by a friend of mine: http://objectfabric.com http://objectfabric.com. A couple of big differences are that ObjectFabric is implemented in Java, and it is supposed to support secure authentication. Edit: Looking a bit more, I noticed that ObjectFabric doesn't yet support JavaScript directly, only through GWT.
desireco42 15y ago
Pretty awesome. I like discussion so far, a lot of good points made, however no-one didn't mention now.js, and this kind of is mostly similar to now.js and magic it does. It definitely has a potential to bring huge changes. I love how packages are bundled. Other things as well. I will try it out with coffeescript. Congratulations guys, this is pretty awesome.
netopolit 15y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but Meteor seem similar to Derby (derbyjs.com). Don't have any experience with either yet but Derby's MIT license seems more appealing than Meteor's GPL / commercial license.
AhtiK 15y ago
Being licensed as GPL2 ( https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/LICENSE.txt ) isn't this a risk when using it for any commercial purpose?
reilly3000 15y ago
I would love to see somebody build HN or reddit on Meteor - I bet the social dynamic would be different. I don't know how, but it would be...
troels 15y ago
Very impressive and an inevitable evolution, I guess. Although I must say that this is exactly what Stallman is warning us about. Javascript applications are fine as long as they are used as intended by the programmer, but they do not have the interoperability of a html+http application. Fundamentally, this is reducing the browser to a thin client.
robomartin 15y ago
Why does one have to point to origin.meteor.com to host on a custom domain? Does using "meteor bundle" also require pointing to origin.meteor.com?
spasquali 15y ago
This is just the client code necessary to run a todo app: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/examples/todos/client https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/examples/todos/... Seems rather fat. Fatter than what I've seen for Knockout, or Ember, or even Backbone. As I suspected this idea of just dropping any package and bang it works depends on that package having been made available by the Meteor team, and the requisite wrapper/bindings made around the original package. Which means now using Meteor means you must use their package, which even with best intentions, means their team will have to keep up to date with every package you'd like to use, every new version, the bugs, etc. What if my data comes from multiple sources ("the cloud" and "big data" and "3.0" means your apps don't all share the same persistence layer, and likely use several) What if I push 1000 records of data to the client, in the html for efficiency and network reasons, to power my fancy D3 chloropleth, and the client interface allows manipulation of that (local) data. How do I take advantage of Meteor's data binding system? This is something almost every serious application does -- updating a local data structure and propagating that change to several views. Overhead of having all these sockets open? If I want to change 20 items and then update my view, do I now have to write the boilerplate to store up 20 changes, then package, then send in one shot down the Meteor pipe? Do I make 20 calls via client DB bindings? Probably the former. Which means I end up doing a lot of work that I wouldn't have if I had a local model with CRUD methods (like Ember, Backbone, etc). Latency compensation. Sounds great. So I say "pay my bill" and my interface updates with an optimistic confirmation. Great! Now I can drive my kid to the soccer game. Hope I notice that the number got switched back (server fail). How will I notice? Hope the developer implemented a noticeable notification system... Security? Anyone with a browser can change my DB? How do you secure that? Log in? Now logged-in people can change my DB from their browser? Whitepaper is necessary, so this aspect can be tested. Great team. Good ideas. But it is quite early yet.
- spasquali 15y ago
  Meteor packages: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages The comments here are telling: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/packages/handlebars/package.js https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/packages/handle...
atleta 14y ago
The demo video looks nice, but to me it stinks. Maybe I wasn't listening carefully enough, but exposing the database to client code...? Almost a decade ago, back the time when we were writing Java apps, there were some debates around if you should write fat clients (business logic in clients) or not on a local java email list. I happened to throw in the counter argument that you shouldn't give direct access to your db to anyone, but your own code. (Which means you have to use an API, because you can't control what's happening on a client.) Then some DBA guy said that you have to set up the DB access rights anyway and that should be enough. But of course, if you don't use stored procedures, you can't do it fine grained enough. And these were SQL databases (!). We know how that story ended. But what I see here, is retrying what already have failed, only know the DB is even less protected. Doesn't seem very wise to me.

1386 points by geoffschmidt 15y ago

Interesting. I may be in love.

Geee 15y ago

Would it be possible to set it up so that the initial page load is completely static html served from cache? The page would then be updated when it changes, i.e pushed to client and new cache. There's lots of overhead on both server and client side generating everything dynamically, especially on slow mobile clients. Testing it on fast machine on localhost creates visible delay in initial DOM update. On typical content/read-heavy pages it would make sense to always serve static pages as a fast as possible and update cache and client-DOMs on database write.

davej 15y ago
I agree, I want to call the Meteor framework revolutionary, but this is the one thing that's stopping me. Unfortunately, it's only suitable for web applications (i.e. not content sites) because Google can't index it and permalinks wont work in browsers that don't support push state (IE 9 and below don't support push state). In my opinion, this is the missing feature to make Meteor revolutionary in the process of web development.
jsdalton 15y ago
Looks like a solution for this is coming down the pipeline: http://www.meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html http://www.meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html

geoffschmidt 15y ago

Hey everyone! The four of us have been working very hard on this for the last six months, and we're excited to finally take the wraps off. Can't wait to hear what you think! We've got a lot more stuff coming over the next few months, and if there are particular things you'd like us to do/prioritize, I'd love to hear about them!

OzzyB 15y ago
Well, no one has mentioned anything about the awesome domain yet, so I guess I'll have to -- meteor.com -- great domain guys :)
- gotrythis 15y ago
  Meteor is a horrible name for a programming language. Meteor's crash and burn! lol.
  - rbxbx 15y ago
    Fairly certain that they're playing off of [Comet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming))
  - nollidge 15y ago
    Actually, they tend to burn up in the atmosphere :)
- jbigelow76 15y ago
  I was wondering how they scored that one too.
zsherman 15y ago
This looks awesome! Nice work guys.
ernestipark 15y ago
Are you guys in Boston?
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  We visit a lot, but we all live in the Bay area these days.
Tloewald 15y ago
Looks very interesting ... This or something like it seems like the obvious "other shoe" for nodejs.

rabidsnail 15y ago

"You can use the database api on the client!" Does that freak anyone else out? Where are they doing permissions checking? Who can run what database commands under what circumstances?

dbuxton 15y ago
From the docs (http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_collection http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_collection): "Currently the client is given full write access to the collection. They can execute arbitrary Mongo update commands. Once we build authentication, you will be able to limit the client's direct access to insert, update, and remove. We are also considering validators and other ORM-like functionality." So just for toys for the moment. Still, very cool...
- famousactress 15y ago
  Right. But as soon as you have this ability, don't you quickly turn off insert/update? then you throttle/contain reads... So in the end, do we benefit from having a client side database connection? I'm struggling to put together a real-world use case for one that isn't irresponsible.
  - frankus 15y ago
    It seems like standard operating procedure for web apps has been to immediately throw out the user account system of whatever data store is being used and use one account with full CRUD access (or worse), with a (mediocre to disastrous) home-grown permissions system shoehorned into the controller layer. That may be because of programmer laziness or because of some sort of inherent impedance mismatch between web-scale apps and the user account system of most DBMSes, but it seems like a bad way of doing things. I think it's high time we had a web-scale data store that actually had decent per-user access control baked into it right at the model level, to the point where a sane person could trust it to live on the open internet. It seems both possible and desirable, but maybe I'm missing something.
    - 15y ago

jaredsohn 15y ago

Interesting (and smart) that they post to Hacker News a couple of days prior to the launch of Firebase (which provided the realtime functionality used by MMO Asteroids and has been active at hackathons.)

jamest 15y ago
(Co-founder of Firebase here) We know the Meteor guys well and are really excited about what they're building. It's very complementary. We're both advocating a new paradigm in software development and the faster it comes the better.
geoffschmidt 15y ago
I love Firebase. We were in their preview and they were in ours. It would make a lot of sense to use Firebase as the realtime database layer behind a Meteor app. Maybe it could be as easy as "meteor add firebase" :)

chime 15y ago

Just watched the entire demo. First time I heard two people present a product together - definitely makes it a lot more interesting and much less monotonous. After the first 30seconds, I went "pfft, live reload isn't new." But I'm glad I stayed till the very end because it is indeed so much more. It looks very promising, especially if you offer app hosting of some kind (or make it easy on Heroku etc.) I am curious about the security aspect of writing to DB directly via the client but I'm sure you've thought of it. I love the 'add less', 'add coffeescript' feature. Can't wait to try this out soon.

EdisonW 15y ago
Yea, that was my first concern as well. Going around the typical models and straight to DB sounds dirty. :) Can't wait til I get home and try it out. Love the synchronous calls and how it synchronizes between screens, wonder how it scales up though.
geoffschmidt 15y ago
Thanks for the feedback about the beginning of the demo. We had a really tough time with the site and the video because the people who are interested in frameworks like Meteor come from a lot of different backgrounds. Some people have written half a dozen Backbone applications and have written their own highly scalable node.js cache invalidation servers, while other people have suggested that we take the word "REST" off the homepage because it's confusing to new developers. It's tough to find a pace that holds the attention of the experienced people while not losing the people that are new to web development.
- loceng 15y ago
  Don't shy away from opportunity to teach. Just make sure you show it as a link, perhaps that means a simple popover explaining in simple terms what REST means.
- nacker 15y ago
  Amazing stuff! Would 'add pyjamas' (pyjs.org) be possible in future for those of us who prefer to generate their Javascript from Python?

davidcann 15y ago

Is there a built-in way to execute different code on the server, such as proprietary business logic, custom authentication, non-cross-domain APIs, etc?

geoffschmidt 15y ago
Certainly! Take a look at Meteor.methods. That lets you define a method that the client can call without necessarily having the source. (If you give the client the source it will be able to do predictive latency compensation. But you don't have to. Or you can give the client a "stub" implementation that just inserts some placeholder records, while the server goes off and moves the forklifts around your warehouse over CORBA, or whatever.)
- fruchtose 15y ago
  Just to hear it explicitly, does this library allow the client to call a server-side function without the end user ever seeing the source of the server-side function? That's my biggest concern, especially with the emphasis in the video on, "The client can access the DB!"

nikic 15y ago

Consider my mind blown. This is awesome.

deleted 15y ago

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tlrobinson 15y ago

Neat. Sounds a bit like Asana's Luna: http://asana.com/luna/ http://asana.com/luna/

beggi 15y ago
I thought so too, one of the founders was an employee of Asana.
- tlrobinson 15y ago
  Well that explains it. Also, David Greenspan from AppJet/Etherpad.

iamjpg 15y ago

I keep picturing HackerNews being rewritten with Meteor so I can watch up-votes in realtime. Seriously though, Meteor looks incredible and I can't wait to mess around with it! Awesome work.

grayrest 15y ago

Lots of smart design choices. I have equivalent bits and pieces scattered all over the place that I've been meaning to put together to get the "wow" that this package delivers. Kudos for actually making it happen.

beggi 15y ago

This looks extremely interesting, and reminds me a bit of Lunascript (http://asana.com/luna/ http://asana.com/luna/). I'm very interested in who is paying for the development? I notice that there's no big tech company behind this and from the contact page I can see Meteor Development Group has an office in downtown San Francisco. So do you have any info on what the plan is regarding monetization?

geoffschmidt 15y ago
Well, I am one of the Meteor devs, and I used to work at Asana :) Luna is an astonishing codebase, and Meteor is a small fraction of it in sophistication and functionality. But we think there's room for a lighter weight framework for the masses. Monetization: We're still figuring that out. For now, we just want to see what people do with it. We think a lot about companies like redhat and mysql, and how they have been successful while building open ecosystems.

luigi 15y ago

This feels to me a lot like how Rails felt back in 2005. A fundamental leap forward and an understanding of where web technology is going. I haven't felt that way about Node.js or even its higher-level frameworks like Express or Batman. This feels like "The One", even though I've been absorbing the docs and screencasts only for the last 20 minutes.

kgosser 15y ago
Completely agree. I thought Backbone was the "missing piece", but this really is it. Edit: to clarify I specifically meant a front-end tool to help me leap a level in personal development skill.
- alttab 15y ago
  In my gut I was thinking "Great, another JS framework." I watched the video and was very impressed. And I consider myself a server guy.
- cfontes 15y ago
  I am sorry but there is no way to compare backbone with this one( but it looks very nice, too ), they aim at different things. I am using backbone for a while and it's backend agnostic which is great ! This one have more resemblance to knockout.js( I am talking client side) and it's MVVM design, backbone doesn't even try to approach that problem.
  - kgosser 15y ago
    Very true. I wasn't very explicit that I didn't mean they were the same thing, apples to apples. I meant "missing piece" in terms of the front-end tool to help me leap a level.
- jguimont 15y ago
  Backbone is almost at the top of the javascript toolkit levels. Let's put it in perspective: - backbone - jquery - meteor <- the low level of the high level :) You use meteor as a foundation to build your application as backbone is more or less your application itself. Think "CoreFoundation" vs "AppKit" kind of difference.

flav0ur 15y ago

Great. I'm sure realtime web frameworks will be the future of node.js and the entiry web itself. However, I do have some concerns. Opening my Databse via the web? Neeh, this is one thing not clear in the video. P.S.: You should provide your cli via npm. Go and register the name before someone else do. (It's not taken currently http://search.npmjs.org/#/meteor http://search.npmjs.org/#/meteor)

kilowatt 15y ago

Cool stuff! Really like the template handler that "notices" which attributes you're interested in and registers listeners for you. Is that implemented with a proxy "this?" or with actual Javascript parsing? gulp Any reason the GitHub link isn't above the fold? That's the first thing I looked for... I'd also be curious to know if any of the live reloading stuff was inspired by Brett Victor's "Inventing on Principle?" Something about tools that let you create "live" seems to be in the air.

md224 15y ago

Wasn't there a Backend-as-a-Service platform released recently for use with Backbone.js? Does anyone remember what that was? Seems like we're seeing a new wave of "front-end only" application frameworks coming out... EDIT: oh yeah, Backlift! (http://www.backlift.com http://www.backlift.com) This is definitely an interesting trend.

defeated 15y ago

The live demo is here: http://colors.meteor.com/ http://colors.meteor.com/ Seems to have a minor glitch with unicode characters? When you do Colors.remove() everything goes away, but the entries with unicode all come back? Somewhat strange... Interesting tech, but db access from the client scares me to no end, call me a curmudgeon I guess.

shashashasha 15y ago
Performance on that url also seems to be super slow right now with a lot of people hitting it. Curious to see how Meteor handles loads, it's really exciting stuff.
- defeated 15y ago
  I think that someone might've gotten clever and done something like, while (true) { Colors.insert(...); } On a related note, they took it down now.

wicknicks 15y ago

Wow! This is amazing. Though not entirely new, I love the idea of syncing database content with web content. They seem to have gotten it right!

equark 15y ago

Is GPL really viable for a web framework? The Free Software Foundation has consistently held that linking to GPL code (not LGPL) is derived work.

skore 15y ago
[[citation needed]]. From what I remember, the FSF is pretty consistent in saying that deriving from GPL code is derived work. If your linking constitutes a derivation (a common example would be a database handler that you adapt to your application after you've loaded it) then it is a derivation. If you just loosely call it, it is not.
- aaronblohowiak 15y ago
  Golden, Bernard (2005), "Chapter 3. Open Source Risks", Succeeding with Open Source, Addison-Wesley, p. 44, ISBN 9780321268532 You appear to be confusing GPL with the "GPL With Linking Exception" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception
  - skore 15y ago
    It is possible for a piece of software to rely on the output of another piece of software without being derivative. Hell, that's basically how any interface in the world works. As the wikipedia article on the GPL notes, the problem is not so much the GPL, but how derivative work is not that well pinned down in copyright law itself. That it appears ambiguous in the GPL is a result of that. My rule of thumb is to approach it from the angle of "what is the software worth if you take out what is linked?" - If the software can function without the linked code, it may not be derivative, but the actual question is whether it is useful without the linked code. Whether it carries out the tasks that the user needs the software for without the linked code. To me, it's more of a social question of how much the linkee is indebted to the linked. So no, I don't think I am confusing the two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lin...
- 15y ago

swah 15y ago

So many projects these days, I wish they had simple metadata like Stackparts projects: meteor - Is a: webframework - Depends on: node.js - Comparable to: backbone.js knockout.js rails django - Connects: ....

jonny_eh 15y ago

I predict we'll see "Looking for Meteor.js developers, minimum 5 years experience" ads in the next 6 months.

mathiasrw 15y ago
Would love it :)

delano 15y ago

This is a very uncool way to install something: $ curl install.meteor.com | /bin/sh

Kiro 15y ago
Why is it uncool?
- delano 15y ago
  You're running a script that you've never seen on your machine with your user account. It's a dangerous habit at best. At worst you're exposed to poor code and man-in-the-middle attacks. As someone else pointed out, it also makes versioning difficult.
geoffschmidt 15y ago
I am to blame for that. Here is our thinking on it: - Though it "feels wrong" (definitely with you there), is it really any different from downloading an installer package and running it? - You can just go to install.meteor.com in your browser if you want to see what the script does (or just leave off the | sh), which is arguably better than other installation mechanisms. Curious to hear people's thoughts :)
- collinjackson 15y ago
  How about making it https://install.meteor.com https://install.meteor.com?
- moe 15y ago
  I'm chiming in here because it may still be early enough to stop you. Do. Not. Require. Root. Not optionally, not sometimes, not "maybe". NEVER. Your universe is ~/.meteor. Do not even think about touching anything outside that. It's taboo. You clearly know what you're doing otherwise, so please get this one right from the start and save yourselves a lot of headache later on (cf. npm). Install to ~/.meteor and provide the user with a small snippet to paste to their ~/.bash_profile ("source ~/.meteor/magic.sh").

DancingWolf 15y ago

It was a few years since I was "in" with the new things happening in the web-world. But how did JavaScript come to be the new "cool" language? It got some horrible problems with object oriented stuff, some really strange bugs/features, and it's slow-ish. I liked making cool stuff with JavaScript, but compared to something like ruby isn't this a step backwards? I can see the advantages of this framework, but it still seems wonky.

cwsaylor 15y ago
Grab a copy of "Javascript: The Good Parts". It's a short read and goes over the parts of JS that don't suck.
- kika 15y ago
  And then try coffeescript which just isolates you from the parts which do suck :-)
exogen 15y ago
Ubiquity is one reason. Ultimately, the "horrible problems" and "strange bugs" just turned out to be "unfamiliar differences." Also, newer JavaScript runtimes (V8) tend to smoke other dynamic languages in speed tests: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang... – so it's not "slow-ish" so much as "really, really fast." ;)
mcantelon 15y ago
>it's slow-ish. Not compared to Ruby. ;) >I liked making cool stuff with JavaScript, but compared to something like ruby isn't this a step backwards? http://fingernailsinoatmeal.com/post/292301859/metaprogramming-ruby-vs-javascript http://fingernailsinoatmeal.com/post/292301859/metaprogrammi...

nicklovescode 15y ago

Very impressed

joshmlewis 15y ago

Why do none of the linked demos work? :/

deleted 15y ago
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Leftium 15y ago
The demo links are randomly generated. The links are preceded by instructions to set up your own demos at these unique sub-domains.

mcmire 15y ago

I'll have to think of a use for this, but this definitely seems really interesting. I think working to make building web apps easier and faster is an awesome mission, so mad props to you guys, looking forward to see where this project goes.

atjoslin 15y ago

This is awesome :D

hbrundage 15y ago

Congrats to the Meteor team: it looks amazing. Questions: - What's browser support like? - Do you do synchronous AJAX to return results synchronously for DB operations on the client? It looked like newly created records' IDs were returned as soon as the creation code was executed. - How do you track a reactive function's dependencies? - Do you plan to make a run loop similar to Ender's to stage and order various recalculations and DOM updates?

ericingram 15y ago

One question: How did you get a hold of Meteor.com?

bryanh 15y ago

Big props on stellar presentation. The code is impressive, but even better is their slick install, deploy, docs, screencast and examples. This looks big. If nothing else, hopefully others will notice the code to support materials ratio. Its just as relevant for straight OS as much as it is for "businesses around GPL".

munaf 15y ago
Agreed. What struck me most was how much care they put into the presentation of the framework, docs, and videos. I'm really happy to see so many developers taking UX seriously, even if it's just for other developers. Quite a nice trend I'm seeing with libraries/frameworks these days.

joshontheweb 15y ago

Very cool, this feels like the natural evolution of the realtime web. I am fearful that there could be too much 'magic' though. Have to play with it before I pass judgement.

zenocon 15y ago

Looks nice. There are a handful of similar frameworks out there (e.g now.js http://nowjs.com/ http://nowjs.com/, socketstream https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream)...the trend seems to be toward heavy use of sockets in webapps. I'm developing with socketstream right now, and I love it. I hope they are all successful.

juliennakache 15y ago
Love SocketStream too. I'll be exploring Meteor to see the differences :)

pirateking 15y ago

I love Coffeescript and Backbone, but was on the fence about trying to build a Javascript only app using Node.js on the server. This looks a bit more interesting to me as it seems like a truly modern web framework, that may actually make web development fun again. Freaking love the name too (admittedly a non-trivial factor to me when deciding whether to investigate new technologies).

gridspy 15y ago

I really like the look of Meteor. We're currently building the next version of our dashboards for Gridspy (http://www.gridspy.co.nz/ http://www.gridspy.co.nz/). It would rock to have a solid real-time library at the core. For us it needs to support our live data feeds, inter-operate nicely with our PostgreSQL db (via our own API?) and if possible take advantage of our existing django application. Our rendered dashboards need to be seamless and fast. I've been leaning towards highly cached static data to ensure this.

charlieok 15y ago

Is there a blog with an RSS and/or Atom feed? That's how I generally try to stay in the loop on these things...

sleight42 15y ago

I had two knee jerk reactions. The first has been discussed already (client side DB access). The second has not. Does Meteor have any opinions on testing? I didn't see anything from a quick glance at the docs. I love the idea of tighter development cycles. But as a Meteor app grow in size and complexity, won't it still need a test suite to prevent regressions? Eager to hear thoughts on this from the Meteor devs.

amirhhz 15y ago
That puzzled me, too, I started browsing the code and noticed there's not a lot of testing of the project code itself: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/tests https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/tests So I agree, it would be good to hear from the devs about their opinions and thoughts on testing. (Is there a chance that they think the "realtime-by-default" approach lessens the need for testing?) I'm no testing zealot, but I've found writing tests useful and it would be a shame to be frustrated by that missing piece in an otherwise great project.
- davej 15y ago
  http://www.meteor.com/faq/meteor-is-a-early-preview http://www.meteor.com/faq/meteor-is-a-early-preview
- debergalis 15y ago
  We've actually written a lot of testing for the core framework packages -- those tests are in each package directory. Look for *_test.js files. https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages/ https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages/ You're 100% right though. We don't have a fully baked story yet for application level testing. It's something we're trying to push forward as soon as we can.
  - sleight42 15y ago
    Cool. Thanks for clearing that up. Don't get me wrong: I want to like Meteor. But I've found automated tests too important to my workflow to live without.

follower 15y ago

It would be helpful if the phrase "simple DDP protocol" on the home page linked to a description of said protocol. :)

sbarre 15y ago

Just watching the screencast and reading through the API for an hour or so is giving me real ideas for practical projects that I would never have tried before because of the sheer amount of "plumbing" required, but Meteor provides it already.

silverlight 15y ago

This is very neat. I've been using Backbone + ShareJS[1] to do a lot of similar things for a current app I'm building. This is certainly nicer, though, with concepts like latency correction and support for keeping the user's changes in place whenever a template updates by only updating the specific elements that change (very cool). A couple of questions for you: 1) What's the current and projected goal in terms of concurrency for the server? Is this going to be able to handle thousands of simultaneous connections? Is the Node server built on anything else like Socket.IO, or is it fully new and unique code? 2) How does this handle conflicts? ShareJS implements Operational Transformation[2] to attempt to smartly handle conflicting writes from multiple clients (used in Google Wave, for example). Does this just do a simple timestamp-based overwrite? If so, how far down the tree? I'm not familiar with MongoDB (sorry), but would it be at the object level? Or the property level? [1] http://sharejs.org http://sharejs.org [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

guscost 15y ago
It looks like David Greenspan (the guy who created EtherPad and then got hired by Google to work on Wave) is on the team so it's probably safe to assume that OT is a feature.
- silverlight 15y ago
  A very good point :-). Just wanted to know what their "official" word is, since I didn't read about it in the docs... EDIT: I see that they mention OT on the people page: http://www.meteor.com/about/people http://www.meteor.com/about/people, so excuse my ignorance about the people behind the work...
  - guscost 15y ago
    Well you got me to read the whole Wiki page, that counts for something. And it's a feature to be pretty excited about!

benrahn 15y ago

For a not-full-time developer like me (I've picked up bits and pieces here and there) Meteor might just blow the doors open on what's within reach of my prototyping abilities. (Full disclosure: I'm friends with most of the Meteor crew, very excited to see the wrapping come off!)

ph0rque 15y ago

Somehow, I feel that these guys are a YC company, but don't want to reveal it yet.

tstyle 15y ago
That would explain Garry Tan's photo and endorsement on the front page : )

flexterra 15y ago

Looks like the future

speg 15y ago

Looks cool! How will it fair if I try to make a mobile app via PhoneGap or similar?

keeptrying 15y ago

Does it scale to really heavy javascript pages? Do you have any benchmarks on when it starts to breakdown in terms of performance? Also have you built a "solid" production app with it?

mathiasrw 15y ago
http://www.meteor.com/faq/meteor-is-a-early-preview http://www.meteor.com/faq/meteor-is-a-early-preview

chrismealy 15y ago

"In Meteor, your server code runs in a single thread per request, not in the asynchronous callback style typical of Node." So node's not a cancer now?

bbayer 15y ago
+1, what about performance? Does this mean all server will be blocked while doing IO?
- alexmic 15y ago
  No, it says one thread per request, not single-threaded.
  - bbayer 15y ago
    sorry. missed that one. Again, I believe multi-threading is not best approach in terms of scalability. Asynchronous io is the secret sauce of node and it distinguishes node from other server side technologies. I think, asynchronous nature doesn't suite well to meteor's approach. I will be appreciated to learn real reason.
- benmmurphy 15y ago
  I thought they were using fibers (https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers) so much more scalable than threads but slightly worse performance than callbacks

yangez 15y ago

This looks amazing - great job. As an aside, it's amusing when you View Source and just see an empty HTML file.

yakko 15y ago

why is http://http://colors.meteor.com/ http://http://colors.meteor.com/ timing out?

deleted 15y ago

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wavephorm 15y ago

Their docs server isn't up, but I'm wondering about all the low-level stuff that I have to deal with every day. Where do I put my files, how can I compress them, does it generate ETAGs correctly, how do I create cookies, and sessions....? Having a way to inject changes into the client solves only a slice of what you do while creating a modern app. Will this framework be just that slice?

javert 15y ago

Can't people find an alternative to the world "realtime" that hasn't already been used for 30 years to mean something entirely different? (As in, real-time systems, real-time operating systems, etc.) I'm not trying to put down Meteor, I imagine it's great.

dreamdu5t 15y ago
Agreed. I prefer the term "auto-synchronizing" rather than "real-time."

GutenYe 15y ago

It remembers me of emberjs

level09 15y ago

Brilliant idea, I believe that HTML5 local storage will never work and perform well. these guys brought mongoose APIs to the client, this will bring along unlimited potential and possibilities.

deleted 15y ago

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yan 15y ago

Geoff & Co, this is wonderful! (Not sure if you remember, but I met you in SF at one point a few years ago and we wandered around the downtown talking for a little bit. Was actually just wondering what you were up to)

tlear 15y ago

This feels like something big or perhaps something that will inspire something big. But you could probably avoid the database query straight in the client a distraction from an awesome presentation.

firefoxman1 15y ago

The live code update without the server restarting is really intriguing. What package is responsible for that?

chrisherring 15y ago

What's the roadmap for supporting windows? I tried to install meteor using cygwin and hit "Sorry, this OS is not supported yet.".

chrisherring 15y ago
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10108840/meteor-and-windows http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10108840/meteor-and-windo...

daraosn 15y ago

I loved this project, nice job... just wondering, what if I want to protect my DB so people cannot change it through the browser console as shown in the video? (also this example http://colors.meteor.com/ http://colors.meteor.com/)

treetrouble 15y ago

This is the first use of server-side js that has made a lick of sense to me as anything other than an experiment. I think in terms of security and flexibility the API may wind up being a lot more complex than it is now. Maturity aside, clearly an excellent idea and work so far...

polychrome 15y ago

Great work! I have to ask, I know that Mongo is all the rage these days, but how quickly could you add MySQL support? I can already see several uses for this, but I need to tie into legacy systems. In terms of security (say a dashboard), could you just disable the system from being able to modify the DB and just read it?

erichocean 15y ago

Pairing Meteor with Blossom[1] would basically close the loop on writing high-performance mobile HTML5 apps. (Blossom recently went full native on mobile -- the platform runtimes are no longer needed.) [1] https://github.com/fohr/blossom https://github.com/fohr/blossom

hbrundage 15y ago
Can you expand on this? To me it seems like Meteor accomplishes the same thing as Blossom, on the web platform at least, except that it does HTML /templating instead of rendering to a canvas. I bet it would be hard to reconcile the two different frameworks ideas of what Observable or Subscriber/Subscription looks like as well.
- erichocean 15y ago
  AFAICT, Meteor solves a different problem: eliminating the server-side of writing a JavaScript single-page application. The auto-updating template stuff is cute, but unless your goal is apps that max out around the complexity of a todo list, there's a ton of performance pitfalls (c.f. Ember.js), especially in mobile browsers. A lot of apps are that simple though, so I don't want to knock Meteor (or Ember) here -- that's a useful niche to be in and anything that makes development faster/easier is great! A Blossom app would simply use the server capabilities and data updating stuff in Meteor, but in the context of a normal, high-performance Blossom-based mobile UI with statecharts, hardware-accelerated surfaces and animation, and yes, GPU-accelerated Canvas rendering (although Blossom now supports old-style HTML/CSS views as well). Mobile apps written with Blossom have virtually the same amount of resource control as a native iOS app, and to my knowledge, is the only mobile app framework with 100% JavaScript controls that can say that. (Appcelerator's Titanium is the other way to go – wrap the native controls with a JavaScript API.) Not to mention the ability to run on Android and iOS browsers from the same code base, or deploy via PhoneGap, or target desktop browsers or tablets with effectively native performance. Meteor is really neat, I did something similar to at least the data syncing part two years with a tech I developed called HubSync, which kept a SproutCore datastore in sync across clients. The net effect was the same -- no server code, data stays in sync automatically, and you only ever dealt with the client API. (It could do a few other things, like still function offline, and was also shared nothing on the server side with Cassandra or BigTable -- I've seen serious problems with Mongo scaling in the past (yay, global lock!), and I have no idea what the offline story is for Meteor.) But still, very cool tech overall, and the team looks like they've got some great ideas. Bravo!

cfontes 15y ago

Do you plan to charge for it at some point? because for me it's not clear. Is there a business model or just releasing it for people to use in their business and if improved contribute back ? Because I cannot see anyone adopting it without those questions answered. Anyway, nice thing you guys have build... keep it going !

aba_sababa 15y ago

I would love have all my node packages available to me...in the meantime, HTTP requests from the server would be much appreciated

norviller 15y ago

Why choose Mongo as the default Data store? Redis anyone?

zach 15y ago

Anyone want to speculate on the difficulty level of integrating Meteor with Cappuccino? That combination seems like it could be spectacular, if it's at all possible.

avelis 15y ago

I know the install script is fairly easy but will this support installs via the homebrew package manager?

xxpor 15y ago

One comment on the screencast, isn't encouraging people to do curl $URI | sh a really bad idea?

beaumartinez 15y ago
No. You can have the same confidence it's legit as when you download an installer and run that. The bonus here is that you can load $URI and read the source before you even run it.
- xxpor 15y ago
  Right, I guess I was just thinking of the opposite direction. Usually I download something, look at it (more to see how it works, not security, but I digress) and then sh it.

rdl 15y ago

Congratulations -- I'd talked to you guys about what you were working on, but it looks like it's much more awesome than I thought.

CWIZO 15y ago

Note that the name "Meteor" is already used: http://meteorserver.org/ http://meteorserver.org/ it's a comet server, so there might be some confusion here (I thought that this was the next version of meteor I linked to, at first). Other then that: "holy shit" was the first thing that popped into my head after watching 2 minutes of the video. Excellent work guys!

deleted 15y ago

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dclowd9901 15y ago

Thanks for the trouble you guys have caused me. I'm gonna have to hose-whip my co-founder to keep this out of our project until it's mature enough.

angelohuang 15y ago

Could someone explain how it could work with Firebase?

jalada 15y ago

The whole Meteor website just refreshed for me while I was watching the screencast. Did they just push something? ;) Edit: And now it's down. Thundering herd?

gsharma 15y ago

I got very excited after watching that video. Meteor does a great job at hitting a lot of things a new web framework requires. However, I then viewed the source on meteor.com. It includes just a javascript and everything else is in that Javascript file. Are all the apps going to be like this or just how they roll? Putting the HTML markup in a Javascript file not just breaks crawlers[1] (they are not indexed by Google) but also (I guess) not accessible to all sorts of users/browsers. [1]: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/echo?q=http%3A%2F%2Fmeteor.com%2F https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/echo?q=http%3...

geoffschmidt 15y ago
Meteor developer here -- we think it's super important to be able to serve static HTML when the situation calls for it (eg, crawlers.) Our architecture is designed to do this but we haven't had a chance to implement it yet. We have a lot of incentive to get to it soon, because it's no fun to be left out of Google :) There's a bit more in the FAQ. Our approach is based on rendering the template as a string (it doesn't require building a DOM tree on the server and then serializing it.) http://meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html http://meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html
- gsharma 15y ago
  Good to see that you are aware of this and working towards it. I'll keep an eye out for it, won't be able to use Meteor before that.

enobrev 15y ago

Very cool implementation, and fantastic site and video! I grabbed the source to see what it would take to write a mysql plugin. As far as I can tell, it's fairly well tied into mongodb[1]. It seems this would benefit a great deal if the minimongo package[2] had some sort of interface to build to for custom data sources. I would love to add mysql-livedata, and a mini-sql of sorts. Or maybe even a simple mini-orm with basic insert / update / delete / select methods and a more advanced "WHERE" syntax (SQL cousin to minimongo's selector magic). Obviously the real magic is in the livedata synchronization. Regardless, this is very impressive. Thanks for putting this together! 1: As far as I can tell, the server won't even run without Mongo, at least according to this in server.js: `throw new Error("MONGO_URL must be set in environment")` 2: An incredibly cool browser-based implementation of the mongodb query api

geoffschmidt 15y ago
Yeah, there still a few places where Mongo is hardcoded (the prototype assumed Mongo everywhere, and we've gradually factored out these assumptions.) Most of these places have to do with the code that automatically starts mongod for you when you type 'meteor' to run your app in development mode. I think all of the database assumptions have been factored out of livedata, but we'll only know for sure once we have a second database packaged :) And yes a second time: to package a sql database, you would ideally have a 'minisql', a client-side cache with a sql-compatible interface. It's not strictly necessary though. There's no reason a DDP[1] dataset couldn't use a different database API on the client and the server (say, sql on the server, mongo on the client), but if you did this and you wanted latency compensation, you'd have to write all of your methods twice, once against each API. I am really excited about having sql support, but we tried really hard to defer anything that wasn't absolutely necessary for release :) [1] DDP is the protocol that livedata speaks between the client and the server. In Meteor, the client and the server mostly keep themselves at arm's length. The client doesn't know that the server is made with Meteor, just that it speaks DDP, and vice versa.

eliaskg 15y ago

First of all, the project is great! I think many of us have always dreamed of developing for the web in this way. I also think they have to try to solve the "API Problem" at some point. Mobile apps are native and they will remain native for some time. Nobody wants to implement a web app with Meteor and re-write an API in a traditional manner. But nevertheless this is a very interesting piece of work and I am thrilled to hear about updates!

melpomene 15y ago

How is security handled here when it seems like the client can write freely to the database? Are there any restrictions?

usamec 15y ago
there are no restrictions so far :)

keeptrying 15y ago

A big part of the problem is building the community. Ie the right license and creating a core group that's more than just the employees of one company. The tech looks great but I think the community is key for this to be adopted rather than anything else. Rails nailed the community aspect and that's a big reason to its success.

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neebz 15y ago

woha. this looks like what I build using Nowjs and Knockoutjs. (https://github.com/neebz/Real-Time-Notice-Board https://github.com/neebz/Real-Time-Notice-Board) plus mongodb access. Great stuff.

antihero 15y ago

How do you handle authentication and authorization in real-world apps?

Jebus 15y ago

GPL?! I don't even..

micheljansen 15y ago

My first impression of this: wow. If Meteor is all it appears to be, this is nothing short of revolutionary. My second reaction: what happens when the magic ends? When I was new to Rails, I really loved how easy it was to get started with scaffolding, a nice DSL for specifying relations, nifty form helpers. However, the first time I veered a little off the golden path and wanted to do something a little more complicated (that was not supported by the form helpers at that time), I ran into a huge wall. I found out that I actually had no idea how Rails worked. The magic had hidden all complexity from me before, and now the magic failed me and I didn't know where to start doing it on my own. Rails has matured a lot since then (it also dropped some of the magic in favor of more explicit behavior) and my understanding of the framework has grown with it. Meteor looks even more magic to me. There is so much stuff happening. What if I plan to do a lot of dynamic updates and I want to defer live-updating because I am doing mass-updates? What if I need a hard division between client/server code? What if I want to share the backend with an iOS app or something? Can I use this to build an API? The documentation does not yet fully answer these questions for me.

danmaz74 15y ago
This was my first concern too. I didn't have time to study the documentation, but I hope it is easy to integrate custom solutions both around and on top of the magic whenever it's necessary.
csomar 15y ago
I can't upvote this enough. When I saw the screencast, I said "Good,we are looking for that". But I want to know how this work, and how I can hack the core. At some point of building my app, I'll need finer degree of control.
- Lambent_Cactus 15y ago
  The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/meteor/meteor https://github.com/meteor/meteor
entropy_ 15y ago
Joel Spolsky coined a term for this type of problem. The "leaky abstraction". See here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

tete 15y ago

Looks interesting, but.. $ curl install.meteor.com | sh Unable to install. Meteor supports RedHat and Debian. Installation failed. However the slow start description in their README works fine. Maybe this should be mentioned in the message above? https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/README.md Looks like an interesting approach. I always thought SocketStream would be the next big thing, but now I am uncertain. Nice that there are a number of frameworks though! :) http://www.socketstream.org/tour http://www.socketstream.org/tour Oh, a CoffeeScript would be nice.

kodablah 15y ago
I still think SocketStream is the next big thing. The 0.3 release is moving along well and I have had fantastic success with it. The features touted by Meteor seem to already exist in SocketStream (template choice, server/client push/pull, DB choice) besides the "no server code part". It also works very well on Windows of course.
- zenocon 15y ago
  I've been building a SocketStream app for a couple weeks now, and this was my thought too -- plus it has other, important stuff done (e.g. authentication/authorization is working/sync'd up between http and sockets). Meteor has some nice packaging and deploy stuff and the hosting is nice, but that to me is a nice-to-have.
tete 15y ago
Nice, there is a reaction from SocketStream on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833096

alexro 15y ago

I'm at risk of sounding offensive, but I don't mean it. I just want to point out that to me many recent accomplishments in the realm of web frameworks sound similar to how Microsoft was making noise back in the day with their frameworks. The MS frameworks were great in themselves, they even cooperated somewhat. But they ultimately lacked in the ability to support long-term development, you know, when people just drop out of the project and you suddenly need to bring someone in ASAP. Keeping this in mind will allow the new generation of "web guys" do better than us, the "desktop guys".

j0hnlucas 15y ago

Going through the examples now. This is blowing my mind. Excellent job guys!!!

erjjones 15y ago

If this is what it says it is ... then it will rival Rails for sure.

darylteo 15y ago

Hi Geoff, something I've been wondering: how can Meteor help prevent race conditions? For example, if there is a lengthy piece of text (say a blog post) being edited by > 1 person. Can Meteor simply lock a resource and prevent edits on client-side or is this something that needs further tweaking by the developer? Or will it somehow have Google Docs style collaborative editing? Regards, daryl

jameswyse 15y ago

This is.. Awesome! I've been using node.js for a while and I think I've tried all of the different frameworks, none of them seemed quite right.. I eventually settled on using express and building on top of it with modules and my own code. When I installed the leaderboard example I expected a big directory with a million files.. my jaw dropped when I saw the whole app was 3 files! And app.js was tiny! This looks like the node framework we've all been waiting for. I really can't wait until this is more polished so I can actually use it for live apps. Great job guys, bravo!

villagefool 15y ago

Trying to read your docs and examples to figure what is in the framework (Leaderboard is a Meteor object?) and how it works. An image showing the sequence/flow of data between client/server/framework/and user code, would of helped a lot.

mikecaron 15y ago

Can't wait to deploy my first meteor app on Heroku!

skeptical 15y ago

This is what I've waiting for. Knockout, backbone, spine et al gave a glimpse of what html frontend development would be in the future. The future is here now. Cool. I'll drink a beer because of this. EDIT: please... couchdb support for over the top awesomeness.

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mkmcdonald 15y ago

So, has anyone actually read the code? I'd guess that these guys have spent a maximum of one month writing JavaScript. It's a giant mess. All flash, no substance.

Raynos 15y ago
Agreed, the codebase is a mess. The ideas are nice, the implementation is absolutely horrible.

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hk_kh 15y ago

I have typed a (lame) version of the installer compatible with archlinux (through dpkg) https://raw.github.com/gist/2360250/a5d101386590a17fed026c7b07725d53f296dbde/install-meteor.sh https://raw.github.com/gist/2360250/a5d101386590a17fed026c7b... EDIT: didn't see https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=24167 https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=24167 ...

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Metapony 15y ago

Ha! I was watching the example just now, and got a sudden grey screen http error -- "No data received"

goldmab 15y ago

Shouldn't this page be more clear about the fact that this completely insecure and not currently suitable for any public website, due to the unlimited database rights?

vishl 15y ago

What are the client-side performance implications? I am worried about running this on mobile clients (mobile web or within phonegap). Three things in particular: 1. Running complex DB queries on the client 2. The in-memory database cache described in the documentation using a lot of memory 3. Having little control over how often the client hits the server and vice versa.

tent1 15y ago

At first face it looks a genius idea, but the more I think about it the less convinced I am about it all. It seems as though it has combined automatic polling and asynchronous updating together, and has removed traditional controllers and models. Yeah, it's cool out of the box and yeah, it's great for scaffolding and rapid development. But really, it seems like another stack to learn and completely depend upon, and with codebase that 'liquid' it seems like it's much riskier than doing things traditionally. I'd be worried that it auto-injects into the running app. Don't get me wrong — it's amazing. But what's the real, actual benefit here?

erikpukinskis 15y ago

I'm surprised no one is talking about the glaring hole, which is security. It's apparently on the developers' short list of high priority features (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10100813/data-validation-and-security-in-meteor http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10100813/data-validation-...) but it doesn't seem like a trivial addition. With client-side DB access, and eventual consistency baked into the platform as a core feature, you can't just throw "if current_user == object.owner" in your controller and call it a day. I'd love to know what they're thinking here. Certainly you could go with a row-level security scheme like CouchDB has, where you attach little javascript snippets to your database that check security. But then how does the client verify? Maybe you can just assume that only malicious users will ever bump into security problems and so client-side verification is unnecessary. If auth is baked into the framework, then maybe they can give you basic row-level security for free by maintaining a user table with auth tokens that's only accessible on the server side, and passing the auth token along with every database request, and maintaining a meteor-controlled owner key on objects. But that doesn't help if your security checks are more involved. I.e.: "if object.owner.friends.includes?(current_user)". I'd love to hear what they're planning for this.

upinsmoke 15y ago
From the doc: "Currently the client is given full write access to the collection. They can execute arbitrary Mongo update commands. Once we build authentication, you will be able to limit the client's direct access to insert, update, and remove. We are also considering validators and other ORM-like functionality."
- erikpukinskis 15y ago
  Yeah, I read that too. :) It doesn't really address my questions about how they'll pull that off.
  - shimonamit 15y ago
    I would assume their client DB stubs invoke server RPCs. A few server hooks for your webapp would solve that.

fascinated 15y ago

#fuckyeah geoff!

cslarson 15y ago

This looks like it has some similarities to Derby (http://derbyjs.com/ http://derbyjs.com/) and SocketStream (http://socketstream.org/ http://socketstream.org/). Will be interesting to see with authentication and permission handling.

iamleppert 15y ago

How are they delivering a result back from those async mongo function calls right away on the client? Anyone know??

mcgwiz 15y ago

I wonder how much money they burned to get that domain name. Overall, this seems to be a production that feels much glossier and slicker than other technology "debuts". Is this the new way to launch a technology? Razzle and dazzle the programmer into the latest cargo cult... :/

buster 15y ago

reads like socketstream

devs1010 15y ago

Weird how this just came out a day ago as I've been starting to learn node and I was just trying to figure out a way to blend backbone with node so that I could re-use models server-side. I saw this yesterday on the front page but didn't pay much attention to it and then today I remembered seeing it and came back to it and it looks like it solves the issue I had been trying to figure out myself. All the examples, etc I could find on combing backbone and node seemed half-baked and I couldn't find an easy to follow example for a beginner, its as if this came to the surface just in time.. I am definitely going to give it a try

kelvin0 15y ago

I think this is a great idea, however I still am still adamant to use Javascript. The framework is a great step in the right direction, and is quite an evolution from something like Google Gears. I would love to use this framework if it was implemented as Google's NaCL, running 'native' code instead of Javascript.

it 15y ago

This looks similar to another project being worked on by a friend of mine: http://objectfabric.com http://objectfabric.com. A couple of big differences are that ObjectFabric is implemented in Java, and it is supposed to support secure authentication. Edit: Looking a bit more, I noticed that ObjectFabric doesn't yet support JavaScript directly, only through GWT.

desireco42 15y ago

Pretty awesome. I like discussion so far, a lot of good points made, however no-one didn't mention now.js, and this kind of is mostly similar to now.js and magic it does. It definitely has a potential to bring huge changes. I love how packages are bundled. Other things as well. I will try it out with coffeescript. Congratulations guys, this is pretty awesome.

netopolit 15y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but Meteor seem similar to Derby (derbyjs.com). Don't have any experience with either yet but Derby's MIT license seems more appealing than Meteor's GPL / commercial license.

AhtiK 15y ago

Being licensed as GPL2 ( https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/LICENSE.txt ) isn't this a risk when using it for any commercial purpose?

reilly3000 15y ago

I would love to see somebody build HN or reddit on Meteor - I bet the social dynamic would be different. I don't know how, but it would be...

troels 15y ago

Very impressive and an inevitable evolution, I guess. Although I must say that this is exactly what Stallman is warning us about. Javascript applications are fine as long as they are used as intended by the programmer, but they do not have the interoperability of a html+http application. Fundamentally, this is reducing the browser to a thin client.

robomartin 15y ago

Why does one have to point to origin.meteor.com to host on a custom domain? Does using "meteor bundle" also require pointing to origin.meteor.com?

spasquali 15y ago

This is just the client code necessary to run a todo app: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/examples/todos/client https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/examples/todos/... Seems rather fat. Fatter than what I've seen for Knockout, or Ember, or even Backbone. As I suspected this idea of just dropping any package and bang it works depends on that package having been made available by the Meteor team, and the requisite wrapper/bindings made around the original package. Which means now using Meteor means you must use their package, which even with best intentions, means their team will have to keep up to date with every package you'd like to use, every new version, the bugs, etc. What if my data comes from multiple sources ("the cloud" and "big data" and "3.0" means your apps don't all share the same persistence layer, and likely use several) What if I push 1000 records of data to the client, in the html for efficiency and network reasons, to power my fancy D3 chloropleth, and the client interface allows manipulation of that (local) data. How do I take advantage of Meteor's data binding system? This is something almost every serious application does -- updating a local data structure and propagating that change to several views. Overhead of having all these sockets open? If I want to change 20 items and then update my view, do I now have to write the boilerplate to store up 20 changes, then package, then send in one shot down the Meteor pipe? Do I make 20 calls via client DB bindings? Probably the former. Which means I end up doing a lot of work that I wouldn't have if I had a local model with CRUD methods (like Ember, Backbone, etc). Latency compensation. Sounds great. So I say "pay my bill" and my interface updates with an optimistic confirmation. Great! Now I can drive my kid to the soccer game. Hope I notice that the number got switched back (server fail). How will I notice? Hope the developer implemented a noticeable notification system... Security? Anyone with a browser can change my DB? How do you secure that? Log in? Now logged-in people can change my DB from their browser? Whitepaper is necessary, so this aspect can be tested. Great team. Good ideas. But it is quite early yet.

spasquali 15y ago
Meteor packages: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages The comments here are telling: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/packages/handlebars/package.js https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/packages/handle...

atleta 14y ago

The demo video looks nice, but to me it stinks. Maybe I wasn't listening carefully enough, but exposing the database to client code...? Almost a decade ago, back the time when we were writing Java apps, there were some debates around if you should write fat clients (business logic in clients) or not on a local java email list. I happened to throw in the counter argument that you shouldn't give direct access to your db to anyone, but your own code. (Which means you have to use an API, because you can't control what's happening on a client.) Then some DBA guy said that you have to set up the DB access rights anyway and that should be enough. But of course, if you don't use stored procedures, you can't do it fine grained enough. And these were SQL databases (!). We know how that story ended. But what I see here, is retrying what already have failed, only know the DB is even less protected. Doesn't seem very wise to me.