5 ms·

Thank You DHH (and others)

45 points by FooBarWidget 13y ago

joshowens 13y ago
Thanks for all the great conversation guys and gals! I didn't post this, but I am glad it made it to HN for sure! If you are looking to get into Meteor, check out http://yauh.de/articles/376/best-learning-resources-for-meteorjs http://yauh.de/articles/376/best-learning-resources-for-mete... and be sure to join http://crater.io http://crater.io to keep up on the latest news.
rhgraysonii 13y ago
This really hits the nail on the head for me. I discovered meteor when I was just beginning to seriously code web applications, and regardless of the downsides it has, it was truly, truly fun. The ability to rapidly go from idea to implementation is extremely fast, ridiculously simple to pick up, and it's all in a simple to learn language, even for an absolute beginner. Would i build my production app in meteor right now? For a prototype, yes. Would I transition from an established web application with a large userbase to meteor? Almost definitely no, at the current stage. But what we glorify here in this startup culture is to get an idea out and see if it works, and Meteor is absolutely amazing for exactly that. The simple deployment, the ease of use, and the freedom to build the structure as you choose (for better or for worse) truly opens many, many more doors than it closes at the early stage. I'm no fanboy but I'm very excited to see where Meteor heads in the future and am extremely glad that it continues to gain traction and attention, be it positive or negative.
Tarang 13y ago
I really like coding in Meteor. When deciding instead of thinking as to whether I should use meteor I thought on why I shouldn't. The main reason to not use it was scaling but It's evident the meteor guys are working on that for the 1.0 release. (See https://trello.com/board/meteor-roadmap/508721606e02bb9d570016ae https://trello.com/board/meteor-roadmap/508721606e02bb9d5700...) Hopefully they do this well but I feel from their work before they will. I've been using Meteor since it was sub v0.2 and its just improved each iteration. First it was the license, then authentication, then it was routing, then its ability to play well with JQuery. Slowly all of the issues with it are disappearing. One thing I like is in meteor code is isomorphic. And on the server I'm not in the callback hell I was having with node. So there are evented fibers that do all this stuff and the code remains clean! Best of both worlds.
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
  Growing pains, that's all. They've really done a lot of work. The jump from 0.6.4 to 0.6.5 was 775 commits. Wow. We're seeing concepts being fleshed out, they'll be refactored and strengthen in time. The team seems to be fully focused on 1.0. Scalability is still a big concern, but it's only a problem you can be so lucky too have. Meteor still needs to improve code structure, there's no common architectural pattern yet (just some lose guide lines). In my opinion, it would be a benefit. Meteor is still in its infancy and a developer is left to their own devices, rather then common sharable patterns. Rails does this well with the plethora of use-case strengthened API design, a benefit of it's maturity. Meteor will get there.
  - joshowens 13y ago
    Yes, I remember rails going through this same "growing pains" of leaving a lot of stuff up to the developers. I look forward to the ride Meteor will provide and see where it gets.
- joshowens 13y ago
  Yeah, the next release will have OpsLog support for MongoDB and it will help tremendously with scaling if you are willing to figure out how to get OpsLog working for Mongo.
delroth 13y ago
Meteor is so great that your blog post seems to load only 25% of the time on my 3G connection, freezing for no apparent reason on a useless "We work at Cintrifuse" page the rest of the time (without any indicator that it's loading anything - and leaving it untouched for 5min does not help). Scaling is good, having your website actually work is IMO better.
- aw3c2 13y ago
  The blank page loaded spectacularly fast for me. Not sure why it was submitted though.
- naiquevin 13y ago
  > on a useless "We work at Cintrifuse" page the rest of the time Looks like it's the header and footer joint together waiting for content to appear in between delivered via websockets. Never tried Meteor but I don't get the point of using websockets for blog posts unless it's purely for learning. Does Meteor encourage such use of websockets? If yes, why? (Genuinely curious)
  - joshowens 13y ago
    We are tracking realtime readers in the sidebar and plan to start doing inline commenting and passage favoriting. I also think it is cool that I can fix typos realtime while people are reading.
    - vdaniuk 13y ago
      How does it work with search engines? Do you regenerate a static html version every x seconds?
    - joshowens 13y ago
      Google appends a ?_escaped_fragment_= onto the url and the spiderable package serves up a copy of the article from phantomjs. See http://differential.io/blog/thank-you-dhh-and-others?_escaped_fragment_= http://differential.io/blog/thank-you-dhh-and-others?_escape...
instakill 13y ago
What do you use for the counter showing how many current users there are? GA API?
- Tarang 13y ago
  It looks like they're using a publish function (Meteor) to send down the number of users reactively.
  - joshowens 13y ago
    You are correct, we are tracking open DDP connections to the server inside the node.js backend meteor gives us.
matthewmacleod 13y ago
Meteor is great, in that it's a really interesting look at what the future of web app development could look like - we've got ubiquitous JS runtimes on servers and clients, always-available internet connections, that kind of thing, and we need to be looking and playing with other approaches. And I think Meteor's is interesting. But it's not going to 'kill' Rails any more than Rails killed PHP. I've seen loads of frameworks and indeed developers pop up who have taken the great ideas that frameworks like Rails had, and incorporated them into PHP projects. No doubt we'll see the same over time as new frameworks and tools arise elsewhere. And ultimately what we want is a better, more diverse selection of tools which are competing with and learning from each other. Would I build a production app in Meteor? Almost certainly not. I'll probably have a crack at a prototype sometime soon (last time I tried, it was too underdeveloped to use) and no doubt I'll learn a bit on the way. But Differential's site is not an encouraging example - it requires JS, feels pretty slow and broken in places, and offers nothing that couldn't be executed as well (or better!) using any other toolset or framework.
- joshowens 13y ago
  What are you finding is broken in places?
  - idProQuo 13y ago
    One thing I noticed: The live count of how many people are reading this post is cool. However, every time it updates, it makes the author's picture flash, which started to give me a headache.
    - rywalker 13y ago
      curious what browser you're using?
      - idProQuo 13y ago
        Chrome 30 on OSX Lion
h2s 13y ago
I have a vague feeling of excitement about the future of JS development in general. Whether or not Meteor is going to be the bringer of that bright future is something I'm not so sure of. On the topic of constructive criticism, differential.io could really do with ditching that "We work at Cintrifuse" interstitial before the blog post is displayed. In the spirit of being constructive, I will simply say that my experience as a reader would have been vastly better without it.
- joshowens 13y ago
  We are actually lacking a loading screen, so you are just seeing the header and footer mashing together while the content loads.
  - h2s 13y ago
    It's funny, my gut reaction to your explanation is one of technological conservatism. "This is a problem that shouldn't exist! Don't use JavaScript for that!", I want to exclaim. But I remember thinking similar things years ago when Slashdot introduced a bunch of JavaScript enhancements on top of what had been a very spartan HTML-based comment UI. The technologically conservative point of view was wrong then, and I think it'd be equally wrong now.
    - joshowens 13y ago
      Yeah, My mind initially had trouble accepting the changes in how to think about data and reactivity, but I think it has been worth it in the end. Very much a "there is no spoon" type of moment.
jtfairbank 13y ago
Just a heads up- your headshot flashes white every time a new reader loads or leaves your page and the XXX readers are here line updates. Its quite distracting now, since you're on the front page of HN and a lot of people are going to the article.
- joshowens 13y ago
  Thanks, I hadn't seen that, I will look into it. I know the new Meteor UI release that is forth coming actually solves the very issue of rerendering too much of the page when you update one thing.
- joshowens 13y ago
  Actually, what browser are you on? I am not seeing the flashes in chrome.
naiquevin 13y ago
Heads up - On every blog post it seems to be showing the same figure for "x other readers are here" which is misleading.
- joshowens 13y ago
  Yeah, we implemented it naively in a few hours one night this week, we plan to go back and do a deeper sidebar listing our urls.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
MatthewPhillips 13y ago
If you're intrigued by Meteor and real-time apps but are turned off by the need to live in the Meteor ecosystem and the magicness of it all, I highly recommend checking out Feathers[1]. Feathers is built on top of Express and Socket.IO so there is no magic, all Express middleware works, and you can use whatever client-side framework you prefer, it just gives you the real-time benefits for free without the commitment you have to make by switching to a big framework like Meteor. (I'm not affiliated with Feathers, just a fan). [1]http://feathersjs.com/ http://feathersjs.com/
- joshowens 13y ago
  Meteor.js is built on top of node, connect, and socket.io... Not really much magic here either, once you dig into it - just like any framework.
jaredcwhite 13y ago
The future of the web isn't "everything in JavaScript" - it's everything in whatever damn language you like. The JS runtime is nearly, or is now perhaps, perfectly capable of being what your own language "compiles" to - for instance, I love Ruby so I'm betting on Opal (execute REAL client-side Ruby). Others like JS variants such as CoffeeScript or TypeScript. So...Rails isn't going to get killed - it's simply going to evolve to support rich real-time client + server apps written in Ruby, period. That's my take on it, anyway, and that's what I'm planning on.

45 points by FooBarWidget 13y ago

Thanks for all the great conversation guys and gals! I didn't post this, but I am glad it made it to HN for sure! If you are looking to get into Meteor, check out http://yauh.de/articles/376/best-learning-resources-for-meteorjs http://yauh.de/articles/376/best-learning-resources-for-mete... and be sure to join http://crater.io http://crater.io to keep up on the latest news.

rhgraysonii 13y ago

This really hits the nail on the head for me. I discovered meteor when I was just beginning to seriously code web applications, and regardless of the downsides it has, it was truly, truly fun. The ability to rapidly go from idea to implementation is extremely fast, ridiculously simple to pick up, and it's all in a simple to learn language, even for an absolute beginner. Would i build my production app in meteor right now? For a prototype, yes. Would I transition from an established web application with a large userbase to meteor? Almost definitely no, at the current stage. But what we glorify here in this startup culture is to get an idea out and see if it works, and Meteor is absolutely amazing for exactly that. The simple deployment, the ease of use, and the freedom to build the structure as you choose (for better or for worse) truly opens many, many more doors than it closes at the early stage. I'm no fanboy but I'm very excited to see where Meteor heads in the future and am extremely glad that it continues to gain traction and attention, be it positive or negative.

Tarang 13y ago

I really like coding in Meteor. When deciding instead of thinking as to whether I should use meteor I thought on why I shouldn't. The main reason to not use it was scaling but It's evident the meteor guys are working on that for the 1.0 release. (See https://trello.com/board/meteor-roadmap/508721606e02bb9d570016ae https://trello.com/board/meteor-roadmap/508721606e02bb9d5700...) Hopefully they do this well but I feel from their work before they will. I've been using Meteor since it was sub v0.2 and its just improved each iteration. First it was the license, then authentication, then it was routing, then its ability to play well with JQuery. Slowly all of the issues with it are disappearing. One thing I like is in meteor code is isomorphic. And on the server I'm not in the callback hell I was having with node. So there are evented fibers that do all this stuff and the code remains clean! Best of both worlds.

1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
Growing pains, that's all. They've really done a lot of work. The jump from 0.6.4 to 0.6.5 was 775 commits. Wow. We're seeing concepts being fleshed out, they'll be refactored and strengthen in time. The team seems to be fully focused on 1.0. Scalability is still a big concern, but it's only a problem you can be so lucky too have. Meteor still needs to improve code structure, there's no common architectural pattern yet (just some lose guide lines). In my opinion, it would be a benefit. Meteor is still in its infancy and a developer is left to their own devices, rather then common sharable patterns. Rails does this well with the plethora of use-case strengthened API design, a benefit of it's maturity. Meteor will get there.
- joshowens 13y ago
  Yes, I remember rails going through this same "growing pains" of leaving a lot of stuff up to the developers. I look forward to the ride Meteor will provide and see where it gets.
joshowens 13y ago
Yeah, the next release will have OpsLog support for MongoDB and it will help tremendously with scaling if you are willing to figure out how to get OpsLog working for Mongo.

delroth 13y ago

Meteor is so great that your blog post seems to load only 25% of the time on my 3G connection, freezing for no apparent reason on a useless "We work at Cintrifuse" page the rest of the time (without any indicator that it's loading anything - and leaving it untouched for 5min does not help). Scaling is good, having your website actually work is IMO better.

aw3c2 13y ago
The blank page loaded spectacularly fast for me. Not sure why it was submitted though.
naiquevin 13y ago
> on a useless "We work at Cintrifuse" page the rest of the time Looks like it's the header and footer joint together waiting for content to appear in between delivered via websockets. Never tried Meteor but I don't get the point of using websockets for blog posts unless it's purely for learning. Does Meteor encourage such use of websockets? If yes, why? (Genuinely curious)
- joshowens 13y ago
  We are tracking realtime readers in the sidebar and plan to start doing inline commenting and passage favoriting. I also think it is cool that I can fix typos realtime while people are reading.
  - vdaniuk 13y ago
    How does it work with search engines? Do you regenerate a static html version every x seconds?
  - joshowens 13y ago
    Google appends a ?_escaped_fragment_= onto the url and the spiderable package serves up a copy of the article from phantomjs. See http://differential.io/blog/thank-you-dhh-and-others?_escaped_fragment_= http://differential.io/blog/thank-you-dhh-and-others?_escape...

instakill 13y ago

What do you use for the counter showing how many current users there are? GA API?

Tarang 13y ago
It looks like they're using a publish function (Meteor) to send down the number of users reactively.
- joshowens 13y ago
  You are correct, we are tracking open DDP connections to the server inside the node.js backend meteor gives us.

matthewmacleod 13y ago

Meteor is great, in that it's a really interesting look at what the future of web app development could look like - we've got ubiquitous JS runtimes on servers and clients, always-available internet connections, that kind of thing, and we need to be looking and playing with other approaches. And I think Meteor's is interesting. But it's not going to 'kill' Rails any more than Rails killed PHP. I've seen loads of frameworks and indeed developers pop up who have taken the great ideas that frameworks like Rails had, and incorporated them into PHP projects. No doubt we'll see the same over time as new frameworks and tools arise elsewhere. And ultimately what we want is a better, more diverse selection of tools which are competing with and learning from each other. Would I build a production app in Meteor? Almost certainly not. I'll probably have a crack at a prototype sometime soon (last time I tried, it was too underdeveloped to use) and no doubt I'll learn a bit on the way. But Differential's site is not an encouraging example - it requires JS, feels pretty slow and broken in places, and offers nothing that couldn't be executed as well (or better!) using any other toolset or framework.

joshowens 13y ago
What are you finding is broken in places?
- idProQuo 13y ago
  One thing I noticed: The live count of how many people are reading this post is cool. However, every time it updates, it makes the author's picture flash, which started to give me a headache.
  - rywalker 13y ago
    curious what browser you're using?
    - idProQuo 13y ago
      Chrome 30 on OSX Lion

h2s 13y ago

I have a vague feeling of excitement about the future of JS development in general. Whether or not Meteor is going to be the bringer of that bright future is something I'm not so sure of. On the topic of constructive criticism, differential.io could really do with ditching that "We work at Cintrifuse" interstitial before the blog post is displayed. In the spirit of being constructive, I will simply say that my experience as a reader would have been vastly better without it.

joshowens 13y ago
We are actually lacking a loading screen, so you are just seeing the header and footer mashing together while the content loads.
- h2s 13y ago
  It's funny, my gut reaction to your explanation is one of technological conservatism. "This is a problem that shouldn't exist! Don't use JavaScript for that!", I want to exclaim. But I remember thinking similar things years ago when Slashdot introduced a bunch of JavaScript enhancements on top of what had been a very spartan HTML-based comment UI. The technologically conservative point of view was wrong then, and I think it'd be equally wrong now.
  - joshowens 13y ago
    Yeah, My mind initially had trouble accepting the changes in how to think about data and reactivity, but I think it has been worth it in the end. Very much a "there is no spoon" type of moment.

jtfairbank 13y ago

Just a heads up- your headshot flashes white every time a new reader loads or leaves your page and the XXX readers are here line updates. Its quite distracting now, since you're on the front page of HN and a lot of people are going to the article.

joshowens 13y ago
Thanks, I hadn't seen that, I will look into it. I know the new Meteor UI release that is forth coming actually solves the very issue of rerendering too much of the page when you update one thing.
joshowens 13y ago
Actually, what browser are you on? I am not seeing the flashes in chrome.

naiquevin 13y ago

Heads up - On every blog post it seems to be showing the same figure for "x other readers are here" which is misleading.

joshowens 13y ago
Yeah, we implemented it naively in a few hours one night this week, we plan to go back and do a deeper sidebar listing our urls.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

MatthewPhillips 13y ago

If you're intrigued by Meteor and real-time apps but are turned off by the need to live in the Meteor ecosystem and the magicness of it all, I highly recommend checking out Feathers[1]. Feathers is built on top of Express and Socket.IO so there is no magic, all Express middleware works, and you can use whatever client-side framework you prefer, it just gives you the real-time benefits for free without the commitment you have to make by switching to a big framework like Meteor. (I'm not affiliated with Feathers, just a fan). [1]http://feathersjs.com/ http://feathersjs.com/

joshowens 13y ago
Meteor.js is built on top of node, connect, and socket.io... Not really much magic here either, once you dig into it - just like any framework.

jaredcwhite 13y ago

The future of the web isn't "everything in JavaScript" - it's everything in whatever damn language you like. The JS runtime is nearly, or is now perhaps, perfectly capable of being what your own language "compiles" to - for instance, I love Ruby so I'm betting on Opal (execute REAL client-side Ruby). Others like JS variants such as CoffeeScript or TypeScript. So...Rails isn't going to get killed - it's simply going to evolve to support rich real-time client + server apps written in Ruby, period. That's my take on it, anyway, and that's what I'm planning on.