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Why do people put so much effort in comparing tool A to tool B when either of those tools only cover 5% of all the work that goes into any serious application,
by bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Why do people put so much effort in comparing tool A to tool B when either of those tools only cover 5% of all the work that goes into any serious application, and the time saved by any advantage tool A has over tool B is pretty much negligible?
I mean cool, so Meteor is maybe better for prototyping. Because that's all we're talking about here, prototypes and ultra-simple websites.
It's always the same story, a shiny new tools that make the first weeks a little smoother, and after that it's business as usually for entire life cycle of the application.
Except of course you now have to deal with a tool that still has years to go before it's really mature and stable, and any advantage you gained in the first few weeks is completely lost.
This has nothing to do with software development, this is just about fashion.
- joshowens 13y agoThis isn't just fashion. We launch client apps in 6 weeks, time isn't negligible for us.
- jarsbe 13y agoI'd love to see some examples of these apps, are you able to please share?
- joshowens 13y agoSure: http://www.shinglecentral.com/ http://www.shinglecentral.com/ http://assistant.io/ http://assistant.io/ http://lister.io/ http://lister.io/ Are just a few from the last 1.5 months.
- pauletienney 13y agohow are doing those apps ?
- camus2 13y agohttp://assistant.io/ http://assistant.io/ : > Uncaught Error: Must set options.password > 62afa287c8fae43c43f745c9f43dbcd4b875e531.js:14 > Uncaught TypeError: #<Object> is not a function When trying to add attendees,nice UI though.
- adriand 13y agoNeat - earlier today, I was just experiencing the pain that assistant.io apparently alleviates.
- general_failure 13y agoI fail to see how meteor helps build these sites. These can be built by normal CMS can't they?
- joshowens 13y agoSure they could. Maybe we could just switch to assembler?
- general_failure 13y agoWow. Did you just compare a cms like WP or Drupal to assembly language?
- hippee-lee 13y agoCan you point to some example that are a bit more complex in nature? My issue (that I identified with the backbone tutorials and re affirmed with the Angular tutorials) is that simple apps are easy to do with x, y or z. But if the new one or that one is going to replace the old one there should be 37 signals level complexity type apps out there. While I can't speak for Meteor, I don't see anything running on angular that's at that level. Caveats: I glossed over the fact that angular is not a full stack, I have seen a few angular videos where teams have demoed and presented on complex angular apps.
- kayoone 13y agopodio.com is a pretty large enterprise app based on a Rails+Backbone stack. Their approach is to have multiple Backbone Apps (dashboard, contacts, tasks, calendar) for different modules. So if you switch modules you have page refresh and from there its a Backbone App...i like that approach and their app is pretty awesome.
- buu700 13y agonapster.fm is a fairly non-trivial Angular application; Angular was pretty fantastic to work with.
- bigiain 13y agoI'm sure you aren't going to worry too much, but you know some of us only see this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7633426/shinglecentral.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7633426/shinglecentral.p... https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7633426/assistantio.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7633426/assistantio.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7633426/listerio.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7633426/listerio.png
- noptic 13y agoThis is a discussion about a javascript framework. Meteor relys on javascript on the client and the server so how should it work with noscript? If you want to use a javascript tool you´ll have to add an exception for this tool.
- Grue3 13y agoThere's no reason why server-side javascript cannot generate static HTML.
- ryan-allen 13y agoThere is when the client doesn't want to pay for the extra work for the 0.1% of tinfoil hat-wearing people who turn off JavaScript. "You need to spend an extra 30,000 to get this to work for the 3 crypto-anarchist wannabes who live in your state". I don't think the client is going to want to pay for that kind of interop. EDIT: I don't mean to be snarky but you absolutely HAVE to make these kinds of trade offs when working for people. And you have to absolutely discuss them with clients. When a client asks for 'hey I want it fast like facebook and some of those cool animations I see wasitcalled haych-tee-em-ell five or something right? also it has to work on iphones because my wife has one', there is a hell of a lot of discussion there about tradeoffs. If the project you are building for them is speculative then even more so shit ain't gonna work for some people because they just aren't going to want to spend the money. The last small job I did, I got a late requirement of "this actually has to work in IE7, 8 and 9", and stupid me, not hammering this down contractually the interop from the get go it ended up taking up nearly 20% of the budget in the end to get this working retroactively, and this was a small project.
- collint 13y agojosh owens. your domain is literally "shingle" central what? I don't even
- porker 13y agocough in the UK shingles is the name of a very uncomfortable medical condition... :D
- 300bps 13y agoWe have that in America too caused by the varicella-zoster virus (aka chickenpox). That's not the first thing I thought of though - I thought it was going to be a site to help you find a roofing company. The "hang out your shingle" definition was the last thing I would've thought of.
- rschmitty 13y agothe details pages are all blank for me in FF: http://www.shinglecentral.com/opportunity/HwMGk8B2KgmCppn85 http://www.shinglecentral.com/opportunity/HwMGk8B2KgmCppn85
- DougBTX 13y agoYea, these don't work for me either. Clicking "Find opportunities", clicking on one, then clicking back also shows just a blank screen too.
- DharmaSoldat 13y agoI'm sorry but those look like toys. I'm with buddy here, could you please give me an example that is more complex in nature?
- derefr 13y agoMaking repeated prototypes (in est, experiments), quickly, is how you approach entrepreneurialism in any sort of scientific manner. Nothing needs to scale, or work at the edge-cases, until it has product-market fit; and you might need to write twelve or twenty or two-hundred different apps until you find one that works out that way. That's what makes these frameworks popular with HN: startup founders are not in the business of executing on a known business model (which might be viably accomplished even through a waterfall process and code written in C); rather, we're in the business of searching for a business model by building MVP after MVP, as quickly as we can. MVPs don't need to be able to be evolved into stable, well-engineered products. They just need to prove product-market fit. Once you've got your traction, your proof, your intent-to-buy, you can use that to get the loans or capital, to hire the talent, to build the Well-Engineered Version. Until then, "engineering" is not even a consideration.
- joshowens 13y agoI am sitting at a Meteor unconf today and we are talking about scalability of Meteor... There are some very interesting pieces coming out in the next month to really push the envelope on handling a lot of users at once. I would agree, we are in the business of building MVPs every day so it is much more interesting to us, I bet.
- nostrademons 13y agoThat's all true, but I'm also beginning to wonder how much you actually need those frameworks to build MVPs quickly. I used to do the bulk of my prototyping with Python + Django + JQuery + Postgres or AppEngine Datastore. Of late, I've switched a lot of it to just straight HTML + Javascript + a JSON feed from backends. If I need server-side computation, I'll build a quick Go or webapp2 app on AppEngine. I work just as fast if not faster, and there is far less that can go wrong. I'm not constrained by the idioms of the framework in development (this is a major problem with MVPs - all Rails/Django apps seem to end up looking like a bunch of forms over a database, even if that's not the best interface for users), and if one of the approaches works, I have an easier time productionizing. For my most recent prototype, I started with JQuery (as usual) and then quickly end up removing it when I found that everything I used to use it for is now built into the browser. $ = querySelectorAll; .on = addEventListener; .addClass = .classList; .animate = CSS3; .ajax = iframes. And all of the browser native stuff runs significantly faster, and doesn't require that you download 90k of JS each time you want to refresh. It's not 2006 any more. You can pretty much prototype in Webkit only, most of the things you need are built into the platform, there are easy minimalist libraries that will let you setup a JSON feed out of AppEngine with barely any code, and JS on the client can do pretty much everything. At least until you start caring about latency, but by then you're out of MVP range.
- mbesto 13y agoI'll just leave this here: Let’s say you decide one day you want to build a table. This table is going to be made using wood, nails and a hammer. All things being equal, let’s say you build this table with hammer A that has a utility of 10. You build a second table with hammer B and it has a utility of 15. You, the carpenter, have now created two tables, table A and table B, respective to their hammers. The tables are identical, but the utility is different. Now let’s say your utility as a carpenter is 5 (we’ll call this carpenter ‘ME’). The value of the tables is now: Table A – 50 and Table B – 75. Now, my carpenter friend (we’ll call this carpenter ’FR’) has a utility of 4 and he builds the same tables using the same respective hammers. He now has two tables at the following values: Table A – 40 and Table B – 60. So we can build a simple comparative matrix now. Table B built by FR has a higher utility than Table A built by ME but it was built by a less skilled carpenter! We therefore logically assume the hammer is the key driver for the overall utility, not because it has a higher multiplier, but because we believe we have better ability over assessing what the utility of the hammer is. We then therefore place much more importance on it. http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/06/29/the-cyclical-nature-of-the-hammer-industry/ http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/06/29/the-cyclical-nature...
- bennyg 13y agoWhat is utility measure of? This analogy is way too simplified to be of real importance. There are more tools that go into building a scalable, maintainable table.