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Is Meteor winning now? Commit activity of Derby.js (and Racer) seem really low. I already switched once from Meteor to Derby for more flexibility (npm packages,

by kennu 14y ago

Is Meteor winning now? Commit activity of Derby.js (and Racer) seem really low. I already switched once from Meteor to Derby for more flexibility (npm packages, server-side express routes, etc.). But I'm wondering if Meteor now has more momentum.

yefim323 14y ago
You seem to be right. Meteor seems to give more tech talks and host more events than Derby too.
triplesec 14y ago
Can you, if you have a mo, outline the pros and cons from your perspective? You seem to have a practical knowledge of this, a most useful thing. It might be enlightening for those of us who don't yet know either very well, and raise some questions which then get pondered...
- kennu 14y ago
  Well, when I started with Meteor (January 2013), it was very easy to get a realtime app running (multiplayer HTML game) and the whole architecture was stable and reliable. But it was difficult to extend the app beyond the specific features provided by Meteor and its own custom packages, which seemed like a potential dead-end. Derby, on the other hand, was very buggy from the start and it took a while to get anything working. But once the app was running, it was easy to add anything supported by Node.js/NPM/Express to it. In my case, I added some server-side Express routes (REST APIs) and server-side background processing (game logic). At that time, these seemed difficult to do in Meteor. During the past few months, Derby has proven occasionally unreliable and the documentation is sketchy (the query section, especially regarding security, is quite incomplete). But it has not been a dead-end. There's always some way to work around the problems, e.g. by using a "real" MongoDB connection to read some data on the server side when Derby's queries fail for some reason.
  - jongold 14y ago
    Not entirely sure what you wanted to use Express for but I've found server-side JS with meteor very intuitive. REST APIs are really easy to roll with the Collections-API Meteorite Smart Package too.
    - kennu 14y ago
      It's quite possible that I just couldn't figure out the right way to do REST APIs in Meteor, before giving up and switching to Derby. I think I'm going to have to try it again soon.
themgt 14y ago
In terms of momentum, community activity, and tech stack progress, Meteor seems to be way ahead of the competitors and accelerating faster.
bjourne 14y ago
Last I tried Derby.js, their examples wouldn't run. Some version issue that supposedly was fixed in the repos but not released yet. But when I used the repos instead there was something else that broke because of a backward compatibility breaking change. Since I couldn't get even the toy examples to work, I gave up. Meteor, on the other hand, was extremely easy to get started with. The examples worked and the documentation was decent. Both Meteor and Derby.js are far from finished but to me Meteor seems like a much more polished product than Derby. I still hope both will live on because friendly competition is good and Derby has a niche.
nateps 14y ago
We are still actively developing Derby and Racer. We are currently working on a re-write of Racer's internals on top of ShareJS that will make Derby useable for a production app. See: http://blog.derbyjs.com/2013/03/26/getting-derby-ready-for-prime-time/ http://blog.derbyjs.com/2013/03/26/getting-derby-ready-for-p... Our initial goal in open sourcing the framework was to get some ideas out there and see what worked well and what didn't. We've learned a lot from this process, and we now have a much better idea of how to build a great system. We are excited to see all of the innovation coming from Meteor, Firebase, and other new realtime systems. While there are similarities, our teams have different perspectives on what the future of web development looks like, and we believe there is still a great deal to be gained from further development of each of these platforms. Currently, our changes to Racer will keep a similar API but make Derby apps much more stable and scalable to large production deployments.
- kennu 14y ago
  I'm very happy that there are several active open source projects to choose from. I get a similar impression of Meteor vs. Derby as I get from Rails vs. Django. (To me, their difference is about productivity vs. flexibility, although IMHO Rails eventually became just as flexible and "won". So it's interesting to see if Meteor achieves the same.)
fourstar 14y ago
"Winning" is subjective, plus commit activity doesn't really correlate something to be of a higher quality.

by kennu 14y ago

yefim323 14y ago

You seem to be right. Meteor seems to give more tech talks and host more events than Derby too.

triplesec 14y ago

Can you, if you have a mo, outline the pros and cons from your perspective? You seem to have a practical knowledge of this, a most useful thing. It might be enlightening for those of us who don't yet know either very well, and raise some questions which then get pondered...

kennu 14y ago
Well, when I started with Meteor (January 2013), it was very easy to get a realtime app running (multiplayer HTML game) and the whole architecture was stable and reliable. But it was difficult to extend the app beyond the specific features provided by Meteor and its own custom packages, which seemed like a potential dead-end. Derby, on the other hand, was very buggy from the start and it took a while to get anything working. But once the app was running, it was easy to add anything supported by Node.js/NPM/Express to it. In my case, I added some server-side Express routes (REST APIs) and server-side background processing (game logic). At that time, these seemed difficult to do in Meteor. During the past few months, Derby has proven occasionally unreliable and the documentation is sketchy (the query section, especially regarding security, is quite incomplete). But it has not been a dead-end. There's always some way to work around the problems, e.g. by using a "real" MongoDB connection to read some data on the server side when Derby's queries fail for some reason.
- jongold 14y ago
  Not entirely sure what you wanted to use Express for but I've found server-side JS with meteor very intuitive. REST APIs are really easy to roll with the Collections-API Meteorite Smart Package too.
  - kennu 14y ago
    It's quite possible that I just couldn't figure out the right way to do REST APIs in Meteor, before giving up and switching to Derby. I think I'm going to have to try it again soon.

themgt 14y ago

In terms of momentum, community activity, and tech stack progress, Meteor seems to be way ahead of the competitors and accelerating faster.

bjourne 14y ago

Last I tried Derby.js, their examples wouldn't run. Some version issue that supposedly was fixed in the repos but not released yet. But when I used the repos instead there was something else that broke because of a backward compatibility breaking change. Since I couldn't get even the toy examples to work, I gave up. Meteor, on the other hand, was extremely easy to get started with. The examples worked and the documentation was decent. Both Meteor and Derby.js are far from finished but to me Meteor seems like a much more polished product than Derby. I still hope both will live on because friendly competition is good and Derby has a niche.

nateps 14y ago

We are still actively developing Derby and Racer. We are currently working on a re-write of Racer's internals on top of ShareJS that will make Derby useable for a production app. See: http://blog.derbyjs.com/2013/03/26/getting-derby-ready-for-prime-time/ http://blog.derbyjs.com/2013/03/26/getting-derby-ready-for-p... Our initial goal in open sourcing the framework was to get some ideas out there and see what worked well and what didn't. We've learned a lot from this process, and we now have a much better idea of how to build a great system. We are excited to see all of the innovation coming from Meteor, Firebase, and other new realtime systems. While there are similarities, our teams have different perspectives on what the future of web development looks like, and we believe there is still a great deal to be gained from further development of each of these platforms. Currently, our changes to Racer will keep a similar API but make Derby apps much more stable and scalable to large production deployments.

kennu 14y ago
I'm very happy that there are several active open source projects to choose from. I get a similar impression of Meteor vs. Derby as I get from Rails vs. Django. (To me, their difference is about productivity vs. flexibility, although IMHO Rails eventually became just as flexible and "won". So it's interesting to see if Meteor achieves the same.)

fourstar 14y ago

"Winning" is subjective, plus commit activity doesn't really correlate something to be of a higher quality.