9 ms·

Meteor 1.1 Released – Now Supporting Microsoft Windows and MongoDB 3.0

321 points by foldor 12y ago

josh2600 12y ago
I made a snapshot on Terminal.com which lets you try Meteor 1.1 in seconds. Check it out here: https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/be98f98eece7e102bab130b91d2388c0aaa54e7c4344d90e7379a1cbab741483 https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/be98f98eece7e102bab130b91d... This boots a CentOS 6 box running Meteor 1.1. It's also running on Terminal so you can snapshot your progress anytime you want (or resize to a bigger machine without rebooting too).
- sanderjd 12y ago
  How do I navigate to `my_cool_app`? Do I need to change the apache configuration, or symlink into `/var/www/html`, or what?
  - freebs 12y ago
    If you go back it's in /root
    - sanderjd 12y ago
      Yes, but how do I open it in a browser? Browsing to `localhost:80` obviously only goes to the pre-configured default page from apache.
callmeed 12y ago
I'm curious what startups or big companies are using Meteor in production
- pandatigox 12y ago
  I'm pretty curious too. I've heard and tried Meteor but looks only ideal for creating quick weekend webapps, not something used for production.
  - chadkruse 12y ago
    Here's a reasonably recent list of production Meteor apps: http://www.quora.com/Which-startups-use-Meteor-in-production http://www.quora.com/Which-startups-use-Meteor-in-production IMHO, one of the often overlooked use cases for Meteor is rapid-prototyping. If anyone remembers DHH's video 10 years ago demonstrating Rails' scaffolding [0], Meteor is the 2015 version. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY
- jdhawk 12y ago
  I believe Respondly uses meteor.
- galfarragem 12y ago
  If I had to make a bet on the next important web framework, I would pick Meteor. All in.. :) Edit: They have made another good decision: seduce windows devs. Next one I believe it will be to support SQL. They have a large and diverse fanbase, probably the most open community for newbies and the new generation of devs - the ones that come from different backgrounds - and I have also the impression that I see a larger percentage of women here than in other frameworks, that might mean something; they use the ubiquitous javascript; they promote ubiquitous computing; they have good funding; they have credible and fresh marketing; technically they are, IMHO, at least good enough. These are some of the reasons make me 'bullish' on Meteor.
  - djm_ 12y ago
    With no reasons as to why, this reads like either a paid comment or a fanboy/girl. Would you care to expand?
    - galfarragem 12y ago
      Done. I comment from a too active account to be a paid comment.. Fanboy maybe a bit :) but you can be sure I'm a very critical person.
      - djm_ 12y ago
        Thank you! Interesting to read.
- bmajz 12y ago
  While we're not a big startup, we are using Meteor in production (https://www.getsubcurrent.com https://www.getsubcurrent.com). We picked it because it enabled us to move much faster than anything we had used in the past and while it has issues that I foresee being problematic, it seems premature to optimize for them. The Meteor team is doing a great job maintaining compatibility and not forcing us developers on to make any changes to our apps as they're rolling out exciting new stuff. Granted, I did jump on when the platform was (relatively) mature late last year. Very happy with decision so far and looking forward to building more stuff on their platform!
  - erichuppert 12y ago
    What are the issues that you expect to face?
    - bmajz 12y ago
      Just off the top of my head: 1. We will probably eventually need SQL 2. It might not make sense to be so JS heavy, especially since we are enterprise focused and may have to support older browsers for extended periods 3. General performance issues at scale that I would have with any new framework Planning on solving these problems when we hit them - for now, fast is best.
      - uptownJimmy 12y ago
        Other folks have said this same thing, bascially, earlier in this thread, but bmajz sums it up perfectly here. Can't agree more with this. Fast is best. Meteor drastically lessens the start-from-scratch cruft that makes any other web app framework/stack so daunting to learn. If they can get support for SQL in place, watch out.
- charif 12y ago
  See the list that Slava Kim answered. https://www.quora.com/Which-startups-use-Meteor-in-production https://www.quora.com/Which-startups-use-Meteor-in-productio...
- rgoomar 12y ago
  There is also a forum topic about this: https://forums.meteor.com/t/production-meteor-apps/193 https://forums.meteor.com/t/production-meteor-apps/193
- gaplus 12y ago
  My custom packaging startup Packlane (http://packlane.com http://packlane.com) uses Meteor. Really grateful for this update since the old Mongo version had some major issues.
  - vinceyuan 12y ago
    It cost me more than 30 seconds to load your website at the first time.
    - gaplus 12y ago
      thanks for letting me know - is it better now? I just enabled oplog.
      - vinceyuan 12y ago
        I just tried. The page was still empty 1 minute later. I had to stop loading and refresh it. This time, it loaded quickly.
  - itbeho 12y ago
    same reaction as other commenter when I visited your site. super slow to load.
  - primigenus 12y ago
    The reason your site is taking long to load is because you have multiple >1MB assets. Open up the Chrome inspector and look at the network tab. You're loading 7.7MB, 7.3MB of which are images. There are two gifs that are over 2MB in size. You should reduce the size of them to 200KB at most, and also consider delaying loading images that are below the initial viewport until the user needs to see them. I also recommend compressing all of your jpg's and using a tool like ImageOptim to strip out any extraneous data.
    - gaplus 12y ago
      Just deployed a new version of the app with optimized images. Thanks so much for the thorough, constructive feedback.
tomcam 12y ago
Responsive SQL, please!
- bmajz 12y ago
  Definitely my biggest current beef with Meteor. It seems technically possible and I understand why they would go with Mongo first, so hopefully its just a matter of time.
  - jtolla 12y ago
    It is a matter of time: https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap
    - bmajz 12y ago
      Yeah, I guess I should've stated a reasonable/known amount of time :)
  - maxharris 12y ago
    Ben (the guy in the video) is working on SQL support! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJzulpXZn6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJzulpXZn6g Here's a follow-up talk he did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSI68J9wNJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSI68J9wNJ0 Also, there's prototype-grade support for Redis: https://github.com/meteor/redis-livedata https://github.com/meteor/redis-livedata And that's just the beginning. There are lots more databases that will follow: https://www.meteor.com/full-stack-db-drivers https://www.meteor.com/full-stack-db-drivers
    - bmajz 12y ago
      That's great!
    - Tarang 12y ago
      This looks good with the videos. I'm contemplating building an app that requires SQL. I've built a few apps with meteor but mongo's lock keeps crashing my website down. The current third party packages with SQL support are very experimental and don't support nearly as much as the native mongo driver. I assume when Meteor does this or if Arunoda does it would be pretty awesome. Especially with PostgreSQL since it supports native live queries.
scoj 12y ago
As a .NET developer, I've been looking forward to official Windows support for a long time. I am installing it now! I'm hoping with better VS support for Node.js, there will be more MS shops playing around with Meteor and Node.
DigitalSea 12y ago
I think I might give Meteor a shot. For a long time I have been working with AngularJS and Node.js. Recently I have been working exclusively with React.js + Flux and Node.js to build isomorphic web applications. I like the fact Meteor is isomorphic by default and comes with everything you need. I have always somewhat seen it as this outlier, a great looking framework but lacking the same vocality that Facebook and Google can give their respective libraries and frameworks. Even seeing Meteor from a prototyping perspective it looks like a great tool. The integration with MongoDB (3.0 is fantastic by the way) and ability to quickly create and work with collections from within your Meteor applications without really needing to glue anything together or configure is something that appeals to me (especially as a front-end developer who is asked to prototype things quite a lot). Coupled with the support for authentication, user accounts and easy deployment, these are definitely key features to a modern web application. Windows support is definitely an added bonus, especially for me who switches between a MacBook Pro and a PC for .NET development.
- lordbusiness 12y ago
  The tooling is where Meteor really shines. I must admit I found React to be quite cumbersome to get off the ground, in contrast Meteor is pure bliss. It hasn't all been roses; I've had plenty of obstacles to overcome as I've learnt the framework, its capabilities and its limitations, but the community has been helpful and I can honestly say that working with Meteor is on the whole very slick. https://atmospherejs.com/ https://atmospherejs.com/ is your close friend. Iron Router is a very, very close friend. Good luck!
  - DigitalSea 12y ago
    From what I have seen the tooling is definitely great. I am not the worlds biggest fan of Ruby on Rails, but one aspect I have always liked is the scaffolding. Being able to generate the skeleton of an application from the command line without needing to glue anything together or read documentation on multiple plugins. Don't get me wrong, I love working with React.js, but it isn't a framework and aspects like dealing with data, API's and other more functional aspects can take a lot of time to get working with React's way of thinking. React also requires a certain degree of glue-fu to get it to the same place something like Angular, Ember or Meteor seems to be. I think Meteor could be a nice down-the-line framework. For my next project, I'll give it a shot. I have a friend who has been building something with it and he seems to absolutely love it. Having said that, if you want to use React and Meteor after reading through the documentation it seems they make it easy to integrate with other libraries and even frameworks. I even saw they mentioned you can use Meteor with AngularJS (which is crazy), but cool nonetheless.
charif 12y ago
Great! Curious about MongoDB 3.0 and WiredTiger storage engine performance in my meteor apps. Also curious how it performs in comparison with PostgreSQL.
sebastianconcpt 12y ago
Meteor is great, I can't create a web app with other stacks faster than with Meteor. My record was saving the day with a demo in less than 1 hour. I'm glad is more mature. The only thing I miss is Postgres as alternative to MongoDB. Mongo is really comfortable but some projects needs Postgres badassness. Should be doable for Meteor's team since Postgres is now super friendly to JSON. I guess the main challenge is in the SQL support because is a beast in itself. But starting small with a MiniSQL API at the frontend would be totally fine.
- lordbusiness 12y ago
  +1 vote for a relational alternative. I am a fan of NoSQL, and I am a fan of Mongo, but I'd love to have the power of Meteor with a relational backend too.
- maxharris 12y ago
  This is happening - check it out: https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql https://github.com/nothingisdead/pg-live-query https://github.com/nothingisdead/pg-live-query
- kidsil 12y ago
  I'm actually trying to do something very similar. I'm considering using StrongLoop for a super simple API and connecting Meteor to that. anyone tried something similar?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- xbryanx 12y ago
  You can track some of the SQL progress on the Meteor Development Group's Trello card for SQL support: https://trello.com/c/Gf6YxFp2/42-sql-support https://trello.com/c/Gf6YxFp2/42-sql-support
borgia 12y ago
I used Meteor a number of times a few years ago and was totally blown away by it. Utterly fantastic. Then went down the route of working in enterprise java for a few years and now, trying to get into full stack javascript based development, I feel totally swamped.
- rglover 12y ago
  What are you getting hung up on the most?
  - borgia 12y ago
    I've been wanting to get into nodejs but haven't touched javascript in years and have been put off by the hassle of having to go through it again tbh.
    - jdhawk 12y ago
      So much easier when these frameworks are new and light, and the underlying languages are not changing at light speed...I'm with you.
quackware 12y ago
Meteor and bootstrap combined have made it awesome to prototype new ideas. Everything is very smooth and as a beginner web developer I'm not banging my head against the wall writing large amounts of code to link various frameworks together. A few hours a day for a week have already generated real progress with a startup idea, which would have taken me weeks using angular/express/mongo/node separately. As someone with a full time job who is trying to work on side projects in my free time after work, it's really nice to see progress every night and definitely motivates me to keep going. Keep it up!
- mmikeff 12y ago
  Is the real time nature of Meteor important to your product? I ask because I'm considering trying Meteor to prototype some ideas none of which particularly need real-time data updates in the client. Would I be better off with some alternative framework or is meteor still super quick to pick up and get stuff done for 'regular' web apps? Being able to knock an idea out quickly vastly outweighs any kind of scalability concerns and most performance concerns. (Bearing in mind that I am familiar with JS and Android development, free time for noodling on personal projects is in very short supply and not got the time to learn a totally new language)
  - subpixel 12y ago
    That's a good question. I've been learning and using Meteor for a few months and my projects do not require reactivity at their core. Meteor is built around reactivity, and there is some overhead built in to the platform to make it possible, but it's pretty easy to design things so your app isn't overloaded by trying to "real time all the things". The simplest step is to structure publications so as to deliver the least amount of reactive data needed at each step of the user experience. Another important approach is to understand what forces re-computations and re-renderings and try to minimize them when you can. It's also possible to serve non-reactive data (meteor-dumb-collections) and obviate many performance concerns related to reactivity. The speed and relative ease of working with Meteor makes this approach well worth it to me. Also worth noting is that many of the production apps built with Meteor are not billed as a "real time solution to x". I suspect they have also spent a good amount of time designing around reactivity so they only take advantage of it where it's useful.
neumino 12y ago
When will RethinkDB be supported? :-)
- imslavko 12y ago
  Michel, I thought you were playing with this idea? ;)
DeBraid 12y ago
Been working with Meteor for over a year and loved every minute. Meteor solves the biggest problems facing modern app development: one-language/code base/API for web and mobile, syncing data between client and server, free simple hosting. My intro to Meteor slides have links, etc http://fsto.meteor.com/#/4/5 http://fsto.meteor.com/#/4/5 and I fast-forwarded to GIF that perfectly captures how stoked I was after building a few apps.
primigenus 12y ago
If you're just learning about Meteor or haven't really checked it out yet, I recommend reading the mission page: https://www.meteor.com/about https://www.meteor.com/about - not only is it inspiring, but it helps frame what they're shooting for. The first paragraph: "Writing software is too hard and it takes too long. It's time for a new way to write software — especially application software, the user-facing software we use every day to talk to people and keep track of things."
lloydde 12y ago
I took a look at Meteor pre-1.0 and definitely plan to revisit. I just checked to see if "Mongo package fails to report closure of inactive cursors." [1] is marked resolved. I may be misremembering the issue, but it seemed like a bug with a smell. The sort of subtle bug that might measure the water level, one that could be hard to debug for a beginner if encountered in the wild and one that is essential to have fixed for production apps. 1. https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/2792 https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/2792
ziggrat 12y ago
Meteor is great i used it to prototype the live section of www.sportskeeda.com. Then i had to switch to jquery polling to make it faster. Meteor was fast except for the initial load that used to take a couple of extra seconds. This was reduced to large extent on Modulus. So my suggestion to anyone considering Meteor in production is to deploy on Modulus.
ryannevius 12y ago
Rapid prototyping is all fine and dandy...but what happens if my idea actually does gain traction? This is the part that makes me uneasy about Meteor. It sounds like I'm either going to have to rewrite everything completely, or wait until Meteor matures, if I need to scale.
- sergiotapia 12y ago
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18083835/how-many-concurrent-users-can-a-web-app-built-in-meteor-js-handle http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18083835/how-many-concurr... 2500 subscriptions per minutes on a shitty $5 digital ocean droplet (in 2013). Don't put the cart before the horse, 99.99% of applications don't reach even 100 concurrent users on a regular basis.
  - comp1927 12y ago
    exactly for big cakephp site...wordpress maybe
- hackerboos 12y ago
  What good is a scalability if you never launch your product? I used to shun SaaS web apps due to expense - "Layer messaging, $25/month, I'll build my own. When I get thousands of users it'll be too expensive." Then I thought - it'll take me more than 6 months to build something which doesn't even scratch the feature set they have. Better use the tools and services available to build rapidly now, get to market and swap it out later.
curiously 12y ago
my gripes with meteor are: not sure how ddp works or how to scale a meteor app. does not work with postgresql or any other db. The biggest issue for me is the tight coupling to MongoDB. Background: we used Meteor back in mid 2013. we ended up wasting a lot of time and resources because we had to learn everything. when we did, it did not perform so well, over 1MB going back and forth for what could've been achieved with a simple LAMP or ROR app. I think they've dropped Meteor completely. Anyways, the windows support is nice. Might give it another go now. Not sure what the deal is with MongoDB 3.0. I've been using postgresql entirely now.
- primigenus 12y ago
  DDP is very simple. Think of it like REST for websockets. Here is the project page: https://www.meteor.com/ddp https://www.meteor.com/ddp and here is the spec: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/ddp/DDP.md https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/ddp/DDP.... If you have any questions, post them on forums.meteor.com and we'll try to help you out. It's not "tightly coupled" to MongoDB; Mongo is simply the only database that livequery (https://www.meteor.com/livequery https://www.meteor.com/livequery) has implemented support for at the moment. There are community projects for MySQL and PostgreSQL, as well as partially complete drivers for Redis and Elastic. Official (My)SQL support is on the roadmap and will probably appear later this year.
  - curiously 12y ago
    any dates on when you might see that happening? postgresql support would be a massive game breaker move.
    - maxharris 12y ago
      I am really excited about Ben Green's work on mysql and postgresql support in Meteor! (Check out my other posts on this page for links to Ben's talks about this work.) https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql https://github.com/nothingisdead/pg-live-query https://github.com/nothingisdead/pg-live-query
bunkydoo 12y ago
I've been working with meteor since 0.6.3 and I have had only great experiences with it. I've been going to the meetups in my area which has brought me together with a great community of developers from all sorts of backgrounds - and even connected me with people from across the world via webcast. Nothing but good vibes and support in this community. I saw someone commented with the Discover Meteor book link, and that is the perfect place to start - you need literally zero coding experience to build a production quality app within an afternoon. Also be sure to check out the Telescope project (http://www.telescopeapp.org/ http://www.telescopeapp.org/) put together by one of the co-authors, Sacha Grief - a designer out of Osaka. He is seriously one of the most dedicated, helpful people out there when it comes to Meteor and I can guarantee if you email him he will respond with help :)
- primigenus 12y ago
  Can I ask which meetup you've been attending? We (the organizers of such meetups) would love to hear where you're having a great time!
- sgdesign 12y ago
  Thanks for the kind words :)
JDDunn9 12y ago
Has anyone used MEAN and Meteor? What are the benefits of one over the other?
- primigenus 12y ago
  Read this: http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/meteor_js_vs_the_mean_stack http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/meteor_js_vs_the_mean_s...
- avital 12y ago
  Some people use Angular in Meteor and seem to prefer it over a MEAN stack. http://angularjs.meteor.com http://angularjs.meteor.com
jtchang 12y ago
What does support for sql databases look like with meteor? Is it stable and supported enough to use postgres?
- aikah 12y ago
  It only support Mongodb because it is built on a specific mongodb feature. Basically, if you update Mongodb outside meteor, meteor can track that change.
asenna 12y ago
I recently started a moderately large project in Meteor and I must say, although I was a little apprehensive at the start, I am truly amazed at how far Meteor has come. Built-in reactivity, latency-compensation and the lot makes development really fun. It feels like a mature platform, the community is growing and is extremely helpful. I would recommend anyone who is still wondering, to just try to build an app or two with it and you will know what I am talking about. PS. If you are in the Bay Area, they have Dev Shops at their HQ in SF every 4th Thursday: http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-SFBay/events/221409952/ http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-SFBay/events/221409952/
- primigenus 12y ago
  If you're in the Bay Area but not in SF, we also have the South Bay meetup (that I run): http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-South-Bay/ http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-South-Bay/
curiously 12y ago
here's my question for those building their 'app' 'startup' with meteor.js what does it accomplish for you that normal server rendered framework doesn't do for you? when you build a meteor.js app you need phantomjs to get it indexed...it won't work on older browsers....the list goes on I just have trouble justifying why I would need to write my next app using meteor.js
- primigenus 12y ago
  It accomplishes many things that other frameworks don't, the most important of which are ease of use and dramatic productivity gains. I recommend reading meteor.com/about for a high level overview and then diving into the description of projects at meteor.com/projects to understand how the various components of Meteor function. The original screencast at meteor.com/screencast is also a very useful introduction, and if you want to spend about half an hour building an app to get the basics down, meteor.com/try will do just that. Using phantomjs to index your site has not caused any problems for most of us building apps in production for the past two years. From an engineering standpoint there are better alternatives such as server-side rendering (btw, there is a Meteor package that does this: https://github.com/meteorhacks/meteor-ssr https://github.com/meteorhacks/meteor-ssr), so outside of performance considerations this isn't a super big deal. A lot of Meteor apps also aren't Google-facing but instead apps that you use after log in, where Meteor's advantages have the biggest effect on one's productivity. Meteor works in every evergreen browser and quite a few older ones. It will fall back to polling if there is no support for websockets and the Blaze view library works in IE8+. I recommend just trying it out. It takes no time to install and get your first app started (<1 min) and you will immediately start to see the benefits. Come tell us more about your situation at forums.meteor.com and maybe we can help!
- rywalker 12y ago
  I literally just published a post that tries to answer this question :) https://www.airpair.com/meteor/posts/choose-meteor-for-your-next-software-project https://www.airpair.com/meteor/posts/choose-meteor-for-your-...
xyproto 12y ago
They have forgot to think about deployment. Creating a package for Meteor, for a Linux distro, is a major pain in the ass and discouraged by the Meteor developers.
the_rosentotter 12y ago
I get an astroturfing vibe from Meteor. Coming from the consulting world, I have seen this too many times from entities with vested commercial interests. For this reason I always withhold any opinion until real world experience checks in from someone trusted.
- oafitupa 12y ago
  Yes, I have the same feeling reading these comments. I tried Meteor and it felt like the classic monolithic framework that gets in your way.
- posnet 12y ago
  You know you can always try it out yourself. I am not trying to be condensing, I also hate it when companies promote their product via astroturfing, but at least meteor is open source and Meteor the company has yet to even release their commercial product (its heroku like hosting).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  A little over a year ago I did an experiment. I had coded up a small rich client web app in Clojure + Clojurescript (which I love, and use a lot!). I then spent the same time rewriting in Meteor, except that I ended up spending much less time and got a lot more functionality in the Meteor version. I really recommend that you try it. I hope for really good Clojurescript support in Metoer. I tried it last week, the Clojurescript support only supported older Meteor 0.9* versions, and I had problems. It is on my radar to keep checking the Clojurescript support. I also tried the TypeScript Meteor support, but didn't spend much time with it.
- gooseus 12y ago
  Absolutely, I made a comment making a similar point when they hit 1.0 The Meteor marketing team seems to want to entrench themselves in every naive tech company they can and I can't believe that there could be so many Meteor users here with enough experience to comment so stridently on it. My experience with Meteor was that my current company hired someone (who is/was literally writing a book on Meteor) to be the lead dev and they built a whole dashboard application in Meteor. I arrived 6 months later and began working with them on that application and another Express app that they flat-out refused to touch. I found that though Meteor was easy to pickup and figure out at a surface level, that it got very complex very fast when you started down the path of making a large application with lots of moving parts. Performance was terrible and there were always strange quirks and assumptions that Meteor would make that needed to be worked around later (one instance was their use of random string _ids in mongo which weren't valid ObjectIds). Meteor tries to do everything for you and when you want to do something different, you have to go find some esoteric knowledge to hack around some core architecture or pattern. They don't play well with others and any questions or criticisms I had for this Meteor evangelist usually resulted in abstract arguments that boiled down to me needing to change my entire way of thinking about web apps to work with it effectively. One of my arguments was "hey, where are all the other meteor devs? what happens if you leave or get hit by a bus?" which was also deflected somehow or made to sound ridiculous... 4 months later they leave to start their own consulting company and try to get themselves hired as an outside consultant for whatever rate. I rewrote the entire application with a MEAN stack in 6 weeks with more features, better performance and a decoupled architecture and we've never looked back. Admiral Ackbar would recognize Meteor for what it truly is... but unless you've got a Jedi or 2 on your team you'll want to be double and triple checking your needs before moving forward with Meteor. </dissent>
comp1927 12y ago
Trello user voice converted to realease !!

321 points by foldor 12y ago

I made a snapshot on Terminal.com which lets you try Meteor 1.1 in seconds. Check it out here: https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/be98f98eece7e102bab130b91d2388c0aaa54e7c4344d90e7379a1cbab741483 https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/be98f98eece7e102bab130b91d... This boots a CentOS 6 box running Meteor 1.1. It's also running on Terminal so you can snapshot your progress anytime you want (or resize to a bigger machine without rebooting too).

sanderjd 12y ago
How do I navigate to `my_cool_app`? Do I need to change the apache configuration, or symlink into `/var/www/html`, or what?
- freebs 12y ago
  If you go back it's in /root
  - sanderjd 12y ago
    Yes, but how do I open it in a browser? Browsing to `localhost:80` obviously only goes to the pre-configured default page from apache.

callmeed 12y ago

I'm curious what startups or big companies are using Meteor in production

pandatigox 12y ago
I'm pretty curious too. I've heard and tried Meteor but looks only ideal for creating quick weekend webapps, not something used for production.
- chadkruse 12y ago
  Here's a reasonably recent list of production Meteor apps: http://www.quora.com/Which-startups-use-Meteor-in-production http://www.quora.com/Which-startups-use-Meteor-in-production IMHO, one of the often overlooked use cases for Meteor is rapid-prototyping. If anyone remembers DHH's video 10 years ago demonstrating Rails' scaffolding [0], Meteor is the 2015 version. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY
jdhawk 12y ago
I believe Respondly uses meteor.
galfarragem 12y ago
If I had to make a bet on the next important web framework, I would pick Meteor. All in.. :) Edit: They have made another good decision: seduce windows devs. Next one I believe it will be to support SQL. They have a large and diverse fanbase, probably the most open community for newbies and the new generation of devs - the ones that come from different backgrounds - and I have also the impression that I see a larger percentage of women here than in other frameworks, that might mean something; they use the ubiquitous javascript; they promote ubiquitous computing; they have good funding; they have credible and fresh marketing; technically they are, IMHO, at least good enough. These are some of the reasons make me 'bullish' on Meteor.
- djm_ 12y ago
  With no reasons as to why, this reads like either a paid comment or a fanboy/girl. Would you care to expand?
  - galfarragem 12y ago
    Done. I comment from a too active account to be a paid comment.. Fanboy maybe a bit :) but you can be sure I'm a very critical person.
    - djm_ 12y ago
      Thank you! Interesting to read.
bmajz 12y ago
While we're not a big startup, we are using Meteor in production (https://www.getsubcurrent.com https://www.getsubcurrent.com). We picked it because it enabled us to move much faster than anything we had used in the past and while it has issues that I foresee being problematic, it seems premature to optimize for them. The Meteor team is doing a great job maintaining compatibility and not forcing us developers on to make any changes to our apps as they're rolling out exciting new stuff. Granted, I did jump on when the platform was (relatively) mature late last year. Very happy with decision so far and looking forward to building more stuff on their platform!
- erichuppert 12y ago
  What are the issues that you expect to face?
  - bmajz 12y ago
    Just off the top of my head: 1. We will probably eventually need SQL 2. It might not make sense to be so JS heavy, especially since we are enterprise focused and may have to support older browsers for extended periods 3. General performance issues at scale that I would have with any new framework Planning on solving these problems when we hit them - for now, fast is best.
    - uptownJimmy 12y ago
      Other folks have said this same thing, bascially, earlier in this thread, but bmajz sums it up perfectly here. Can't agree more with this. Fast is best. Meteor drastically lessens the start-from-scratch cruft that makes any other web app framework/stack so daunting to learn. If they can get support for SQL in place, watch out.
charif 12y ago
See the list that Slava Kim answered. https://www.quora.com/Which-startups-use-Meteor-in-production https://www.quora.com/Which-startups-use-Meteor-in-productio...
rgoomar 12y ago
There is also a forum topic about this: https://forums.meteor.com/t/production-meteor-apps/193 https://forums.meteor.com/t/production-meteor-apps/193
gaplus 12y ago
My custom packaging startup Packlane (http://packlane.com http://packlane.com) uses Meteor. Really grateful for this update since the old Mongo version had some major issues.
- vinceyuan 12y ago
  It cost me more than 30 seconds to load your website at the first time.
  - gaplus 12y ago
    thanks for letting me know - is it better now? I just enabled oplog.
    - vinceyuan 12y ago
      I just tried. The page was still empty 1 minute later. I had to stop loading and refresh it. This time, it loaded quickly.
- itbeho 12y ago
  same reaction as other commenter when I visited your site. super slow to load.
- primigenus 12y ago
  The reason your site is taking long to load is because you have multiple >1MB assets. Open up the Chrome inspector and look at the network tab. You're loading 7.7MB, 7.3MB of which are images. There are two gifs that are over 2MB in size. You should reduce the size of them to 200KB at most, and also consider delaying loading images that are below the initial viewport until the user needs to see them. I also recommend compressing all of your jpg's and using a tool like ImageOptim to strip out any extraneous data.
  - gaplus 12y ago
    Just deployed a new version of the app with optimized images. Thanks so much for the thorough, constructive feedback.

tomcam 12y ago

Responsive SQL, please!

bmajz 12y ago
Definitely my biggest current beef with Meteor. It seems technically possible and I understand why they would go with Mongo first, so hopefully its just a matter of time.
- jtolla 12y ago
  It is a matter of time: https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap
  - bmajz 12y ago
    Yeah, I guess I should've stated a reasonable/known amount of time :)
- maxharris 12y ago
  Ben (the guy in the video) is working on SQL support! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJzulpXZn6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJzulpXZn6g Here's a follow-up talk he did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSI68J9wNJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSI68J9wNJ0 Also, there's prototype-grade support for Redis: https://github.com/meteor/redis-livedata https://github.com/meteor/redis-livedata And that's just the beginning. There are lots more databases that will follow: https://www.meteor.com/full-stack-db-drivers https://www.meteor.com/full-stack-db-drivers
  - bmajz 12y ago
    That's great!
  - Tarang 12y ago
    This looks good with the videos. I'm contemplating building an app that requires SQL. I've built a few apps with meteor but mongo's lock keeps crashing my website down. The current third party packages with SQL support are very experimental and don't support nearly as much as the native mongo driver. I assume when Meteor does this or if Arunoda does it would be pretty awesome. Especially with PostgreSQL since it supports native live queries.

scoj 12y ago

As a .NET developer, I've been looking forward to official Windows support for a long time. I am installing it now! I'm hoping with better VS support for Node.js, there will be more MS shops playing around with Meteor and Node.

DigitalSea 12y ago

I think I might give Meteor a shot. For a long time I have been working with AngularJS and Node.js. Recently I have been working exclusively with React.js + Flux and Node.js to build isomorphic web applications. I like the fact Meteor is isomorphic by default and comes with everything you need. I have always somewhat seen it as this outlier, a great looking framework but lacking the same vocality that Facebook and Google can give their respective libraries and frameworks. Even seeing Meteor from a prototyping perspective it looks like a great tool. The integration with MongoDB (3.0 is fantastic by the way) and ability to quickly create and work with collections from within your Meteor applications without really needing to glue anything together or configure is something that appeals to me (especially as a front-end developer who is asked to prototype things quite a lot). Coupled with the support for authentication, user accounts and easy deployment, these are definitely key features to a modern web application. Windows support is definitely an added bonus, especially for me who switches between a MacBook Pro and a PC for .NET development.

lordbusiness 12y ago
The tooling is where Meteor really shines. I must admit I found React to be quite cumbersome to get off the ground, in contrast Meteor is pure bliss. It hasn't all been roses; I've had plenty of obstacles to overcome as I've learnt the framework, its capabilities and its limitations, but the community has been helpful and I can honestly say that working with Meteor is on the whole very slick. https://atmospherejs.com/ https://atmospherejs.com/ is your close friend. Iron Router is a very, very close friend. Good luck!
- DigitalSea 12y ago
  From what I have seen the tooling is definitely great. I am not the worlds biggest fan of Ruby on Rails, but one aspect I have always liked is the scaffolding. Being able to generate the skeleton of an application from the command line without needing to glue anything together or read documentation on multiple plugins. Don't get me wrong, I love working with React.js, but it isn't a framework and aspects like dealing with data, API's and other more functional aspects can take a lot of time to get working with React's way of thinking. React also requires a certain degree of glue-fu to get it to the same place something like Angular, Ember or Meteor seems to be. I think Meteor could be a nice down-the-line framework. For my next project, I'll give it a shot. I have a friend who has been building something with it and he seems to absolutely love it. Having said that, if you want to use React and Meteor after reading through the documentation it seems they make it easy to integrate with other libraries and even frameworks. I even saw they mentioned you can use Meteor with AngularJS (which is crazy), but cool nonetheless.

charif 12y ago

Great! Curious about MongoDB 3.0 and WiredTiger storage engine performance in my meteor apps. Also curious how it performs in comparison with PostgreSQL.

sebastianconcpt 12y ago

Meteor is great, I can't create a web app with other stacks faster than with Meteor. My record was saving the day with a demo in less than 1 hour. I'm glad is more mature. The only thing I miss is Postgres as alternative to MongoDB. Mongo is really comfortable but some projects needs Postgres badassness. Should be doable for Meteor's team since Postgres is now super friendly to JSON. I guess the main challenge is in the SQL support because is a beast in itself. But starting small with a MiniSQL API at the frontend would be totally fine.

lordbusiness 12y ago
+1 vote for a relational alternative. I am a fan of NoSQL, and I am a fan of Mongo, but I'd love to have the power of Meteor with a relational backend too.
maxharris 12y ago
This is happening - check it out: https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql https://github.com/nothingisdead/pg-live-query https://github.com/nothingisdead/pg-live-query
kidsil 12y ago
I'm actually trying to do something very similar. I'm considering using StrongLoop for a super simple API and connecting Meteor to that. anyone tried something similar?
deleted 12y ago
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xbryanx 12y ago
You can track some of the SQL progress on the Meteor Development Group's Trello card for SQL support: https://trello.com/c/Gf6YxFp2/42-sql-support https://trello.com/c/Gf6YxFp2/42-sql-support

borgia 12y ago

I used Meteor a number of times a few years ago and was totally blown away by it. Utterly fantastic. Then went down the route of working in enterprise java for a few years and now, trying to get into full stack javascript based development, I feel totally swamped.

rglover 12y ago
What are you getting hung up on the most?
- borgia 12y ago
  I've been wanting to get into nodejs but haven't touched javascript in years and have been put off by the hassle of having to go through it again tbh.
  - jdhawk 12y ago
    So much easier when these frameworks are new and light, and the underlying languages are not changing at light speed...I'm with you.

quackware 12y ago

Meteor and bootstrap combined have made it awesome to prototype new ideas. Everything is very smooth and as a beginner web developer I'm not banging my head against the wall writing large amounts of code to link various frameworks together. A few hours a day for a week have already generated real progress with a startup idea, which would have taken me weeks using angular/express/mongo/node separately. As someone with a full time job who is trying to work on side projects in my free time after work, it's really nice to see progress every night and definitely motivates me to keep going. Keep it up!

mmikeff 12y ago
Is the real time nature of Meteor important to your product? I ask because I'm considering trying Meteor to prototype some ideas none of which particularly need real-time data updates in the client. Would I be better off with some alternative framework or is meteor still super quick to pick up and get stuff done for 'regular' web apps? Being able to knock an idea out quickly vastly outweighs any kind of scalability concerns and most performance concerns. (Bearing in mind that I am familiar with JS and Android development, free time for noodling on personal projects is in very short supply and not got the time to learn a totally new language)
- subpixel 12y ago
  That's a good question. I've been learning and using Meteor for a few months and my projects do not require reactivity at their core. Meteor is built around reactivity, and there is some overhead built in to the platform to make it possible, but it's pretty easy to design things so your app isn't overloaded by trying to "real time all the things". The simplest step is to structure publications so as to deliver the least amount of reactive data needed at each step of the user experience. Another important approach is to understand what forces re-computations and re-renderings and try to minimize them when you can. It's also possible to serve non-reactive data (meteor-dumb-collections) and obviate many performance concerns related to reactivity. The speed and relative ease of working with Meteor makes this approach well worth it to me. Also worth noting is that many of the production apps built with Meteor are not billed as a "real time solution to x". I suspect they have also spent a good amount of time designing around reactivity so they only take advantage of it where it's useful.

neumino 12y ago

When will RethinkDB be supported? :-)

imslavko 12y ago
Michel, I thought you were playing with this idea? ;)

DeBraid 12y ago

Been working with Meteor for over a year and loved every minute. Meteor solves the biggest problems facing modern app development: one-language/code base/API for web and mobile, syncing data between client and server, free simple hosting. My intro to Meteor slides have links, etc http://fsto.meteor.com/#/4/5 http://fsto.meteor.com/#/4/5 and I fast-forwarded to GIF that perfectly captures how stoked I was after building a few apps.

primigenus 12y ago

If you're just learning about Meteor or haven't really checked it out yet, I recommend reading the mission page: https://www.meteor.com/about https://www.meteor.com/about - not only is it inspiring, but it helps frame what they're shooting for. The first paragraph: "Writing software is too hard and it takes too long. It's time for a new way to write software — especially application software, the user-facing software we use every day to talk to people and keep track of things."

lloydde 12y ago

I took a look at Meteor pre-1.0 and definitely plan to revisit. I just checked to see if "Mongo package fails to report closure of inactive cursors." [1] is marked resolved. I may be misremembering the issue, but it seemed like a bug with a smell. The sort of subtle bug that might measure the water level, one that could be hard to debug for a beginner if encountered in the wild and one that is essential to have fixed for production apps. 1. https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/2792 https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/2792

ziggrat 12y ago

Meteor is great i used it to prototype the live section of www.sportskeeda.com. Then i had to switch to jquery polling to make it faster. Meteor was fast except for the initial load that used to take a couple of extra seconds. This was reduced to large extent on Modulus. So my suggestion to anyone considering Meteor in production is to deploy on Modulus.

ryannevius 12y ago

Rapid prototyping is all fine and dandy...but what happens if my idea actually does gain traction? This is the part that makes me uneasy about Meteor. It sounds like I'm either going to have to rewrite everything completely, or wait until Meteor matures, if I need to scale.

sergiotapia 12y ago
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18083835/how-many-concurrent-users-can-a-web-app-built-in-meteor-js-handle http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18083835/how-many-concurr... 2500 subscriptions per minutes on a shitty $5 digital ocean droplet (in 2013). Don't put the cart before the horse, 99.99% of applications don't reach even 100 concurrent users on a regular basis.
- comp1927 12y ago
  exactly for big cakephp site...wordpress maybe
hackerboos 12y ago
What good is a scalability if you never launch your product? I used to shun SaaS web apps due to expense - "Layer messaging, $25/month, I'll build my own. When I get thousands of users it'll be too expensive." Then I thought - it'll take me more than 6 months to build something which doesn't even scratch the feature set they have. Better use the tools and services available to build rapidly now, get to market and swap it out later.

curiously 12y ago

my gripes with meteor are: not sure how ddp works or how to scale a meteor app. does not work with postgresql or any other db. The biggest issue for me is the tight coupling to MongoDB. Background: we used Meteor back in mid 2013. we ended up wasting a lot of time and resources because we had to learn everything. when we did, it did not perform so well, over 1MB going back and forth for what could've been achieved with a simple LAMP or ROR app. I think they've dropped Meteor completely. Anyways, the windows support is nice. Might give it another go now. Not sure what the deal is with MongoDB 3.0. I've been using postgresql entirely now.

primigenus 12y ago
DDP is very simple. Think of it like REST for websockets. Here is the project page: https://www.meteor.com/ddp https://www.meteor.com/ddp and here is the spec: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/ddp/DDP.md https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/ddp/DDP.... If you have any questions, post them on forums.meteor.com and we'll try to help you out. It's not "tightly coupled" to MongoDB; Mongo is simply the only database that livequery (https://www.meteor.com/livequery https://www.meteor.com/livequery) has implemented support for at the moment. There are community projects for MySQL and PostgreSQL, as well as partially complete drivers for Redis and Elastic. Official (My)SQL support is on the roadmap and will probably appear later this year.
- curiously 12y ago
  any dates on when you might see that happening? postgresql support would be a massive game breaker move.
  - maxharris 12y ago
    I am really excited about Ben Green's work on mysql and postgresql support in Meteor! (Check out my other posts on this page for links to Ben's talks about this work.) https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql https://github.com/nothingisdead/pg-live-query https://github.com/nothingisdead/pg-live-query

bunkydoo 12y ago

I've been working with meteor since 0.6.3 and I have had only great experiences with it. I've been going to the meetups in my area which has brought me together with a great community of developers from all sorts of backgrounds - and even connected me with people from across the world via webcast. Nothing but good vibes and support in this community. I saw someone commented with the Discover Meteor book link, and that is the perfect place to start - you need literally zero coding experience to build a production quality app within an afternoon. Also be sure to check out the Telescope project (http://www.telescopeapp.org/ http://www.telescopeapp.org/) put together by one of the co-authors, Sacha Grief - a designer out of Osaka. He is seriously one of the most dedicated, helpful people out there when it comes to Meteor and I can guarantee if you email him he will respond with help :)

primigenus 12y ago
Can I ask which meetup you've been attending? We (the organizers of such meetups) would love to hear where you're having a great time!
sgdesign 12y ago
Thanks for the kind words :)

JDDunn9 12y ago

Has anyone used MEAN and Meteor? What are the benefits of one over the other?

primigenus 12y ago
Read this: http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/meteor_js_vs_the_mean_stack http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/meteor_js_vs_the_mean_s...
avital 12y ago
Some people use Angular in Meteor and seem to prefer it over a MEAN stack. http://angularjs.meteor.com http://angularjs.meteor.com

jtchang 12y ago

What does support for sql databases look like with meteor? Is it stable and supported enough to use postgres?

aikah 12y ago
It only support Mongodb because it is built on a specific mongodb feature. Basically, if you update Mongodb outside meteor, meteor can track that change.

asenna 12y ago

I recently started a moderately large project in Meteor and I must say, although I was a little apprehensive at the start, I am truly amazed at how far Meteor has come. Built-in reactivity, latency-compensation and the lot makes development really fun. It feels like a mature platform, the community is growing and is extremely helpful. I would recommend anyone who is still wondering, to just try to build an app or two with it and you will know what I am talking about. PS. If you are in the Bay Area, they have Dev Shops at their HQ in SF every 4th Thursday: http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-SFBay/events/221409952/ http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-SFBay/events/221409952/

primigenus 12y ago
If you're in the Bay Area but not in SF, we also have the South Bay meetup (that I run): http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-South-Bay/ http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-South-Bay/

curiously 12y ago

here's my question for those building their 'app' 'startup' with meteor.js what does it accomplish for you that normal server rendered framework doesn't do for you? when you build a meteor.js app you need phantomjs to get it indexed...it won't work on older browsers....the list goes on I just have trouble justifying why I would need to write my next app using meteor.js

primigenus 12y ago
It accomplishes many things that other frameworks don't, the most important of which are ease of use and dramatic productivity gains. I recommend reading meteor.com/about for a high level overview and then diving into the description of projects at meteor.com/projects to understand how the various components of Meteor function. The original screencast at meteor.com/screencast is also a very useful introduction, and if you want to spend about half an hour building an app to get the basics down, meteor.com/try will do just that. Using phantomjs to index your site has not caused any problems for most of us building apps in production for the past two years. From an engineering standpoint there are better alternatives such as server-side rendering (btw, there is a Meteor package that does this: https://github.com/meteorhacks/meteor-ssr https://github.com/meteorhacks/meteor-ssr), so outside of performance considerations this isn't a super big deal. A lot of Meteor apps also aren't Google-facing but instead apps that you use after log in, where Meteor's advantages have the biggest effect on one's productivity. Meteor works in every evergreen browser and quite a few older ones. It will fall back to polling if there is no support for websockets and the Blaze view library works in IE8+. I recommend just trying it out. It takes no time to install and get your first app started (<1 min) and you will immediately start to see the benefits. Come tell us more about your situation at forums.meteor.com and maybe we can help!
rywalker 12y ago
I literally just published a post that tries to answer this question :) https://www.airpair.com/meteor/posts/choose-meteor-for-your-next-software-project https://www.airpair.com/meteor/posts/choose-meteor-for-your-...

xyproto 12y ago

They have forgot to think about deployment. Creating a package for Meteor, for a Linux distro, is a major pain in the ass and discouraged by the Meteor developers.

the_rosentotter 12y ago

I get an astroturfing vibe from Meteor. Coming from the consulting world, I have seen this too many times from entities with vested commercial interests. For this reason I always withhold any opinion until real world experience checks in from someone trusted.

oafitupa 12y ago
Yes, I have the same feeling reading these comments. I tried Meteor and it felt like the classic monolithic framework that gets in your way.
posnet 12y ago
You know you can always try it out yourself. I am not trying to be condensing, I also hate it when companies promote their product via astroturfing, but at least meteor is open source and Meteor the company has yet to even release their commercial product (its heroku like hosting).
deleted 12y ago
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mark_l_watson 12y ago
A little over a year ago I did an experiment. I had coded up a small rich client web app in Clojure + Clojurescript (which I love, and use a lot!). I then spent the same time rewriting in Meteor, except that I ended up spending much less time and got a lot more functionality in the Meteor version. I really recommend that you try it. I hope for really good Clojurescript support in Metoer. I tried it last week, the Clojurescript support only supported older Meteor 0.9* versions, and I had problems. It is on my radar to keep checking the Clojurescript support. I also tried the TypeScript Meteor support, but didn't spend much time with it.
gooseus 12y ago
Absolutely, I made a comment making a similar point when they hit 1.0 The Meteor marketing team seems to want to entrench themselves in every naive tech company they can and I can't believe that there could be so many Meteor users here with enough experience to comment so stridently on it. My experience with Meteor was that my current company hired someone (who is/was literally writing a book on Meteor) to be the lead dev and they built a whole dashboard application in Meteor. I arrived 6 months later and began working with them on that application and another Express app that they flat-out refused to touch. I found that though Meteor was easy to pickup and figure out at a surface level, that it got very complex very fast when you started down the path of making a large application with lots of moving parts. Performance was terrible and there were always strange quirks and assumptions that Meteor would make that needed to be worked around later (one instance was their use of random string _ids in mongo which weren't valid ObjectIds). Meteor tries to do everything for you and when you want to do something different, you have to go find some esoteric knowledge to hack around some core architecture or pattern. They don't play well with others and any questions or criticisms I had for this Meteor evangelist usually resulted in abstract arguments that boiled down to me needing to change my entire way of thinking about web apps to work with it effectively. One of my arguments was "hey, where are all the other meteor devs? what happens if you leave or get hit by a bus?" which was also deflected somehow or made to sound ridiculous... 4 months later they leave to start their own consulting company and try to get themselves hired as an outside consultant for whatever rate. I rewrote the entire application with a MEAN stack in 6 weeks with more features, better performance and a decoupled architecture and we've never looked back. Admiral Ackbar would recognize Meteor for what it truly is... but unless you've got a Jedi or 2 on your team you'll want to be double and triple checking your needs before moving forward with Meteor. </dissent>

comp1927 12y ago

Trello user voice converted to realease !!