I had a very bad experience with Derby (apps autogenerated with stable or HEAD version always crashed), so I decided to try Meteor. I was doubtful at first. Af

I had a very bad experience with Derby (apps autogenerated with stable or HEAD version always crashed), so I decided to try Meteor. I was doubtful at first. After generating a simple app that automatically included Bootstrap, Backbone, jQuery, Underscore, MongoDB, user registration and Facebook sign-in, I started to become very happy with it. I was also able to add basic user security (edit only your own database items) very easily. Deployment worked just like they said it would (create a tarball and just run it on your server with Node.js). So, even if Meteor is a bit limited (only a few packages available) and still needs to mature, it feels right. It seems to provide exactly the right things for building web apps, in a way that "just works". I still plan to try Derby once it's fixed but I expect it will be more about hacking and tweaking than things just working.