Will Blaze still work with Apollo?
I’m hoping that I wouldn’t need to rewrite a lot of my app just to be able to use a MySQL database.
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See the following (quick summary - Blaze support doesn’t exist currently, but if anyone wants to lead the development of it, the Apollo team will definitely help out).
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So Applo will only work with React and Angular 2 (until someone doesn’t do development for others). Is that correct? I am a bit surprised to know it 
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Yes, based on the Apollo project on-going public discussions, I believe it’s correct - for now anyways. As Apollo develops further MDG might decide it’s worth investing some of their own time on Blaze integration (or if they get a lot of positive community feedback asking them to head down that path). For now though they’re swamped working on other parts of Apollo, so if anyone wants to jump into Blaze integration before (if?) they get to it, MDG will chip in and help out where they can.
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It feels a little strange that they chose to support Angular before Blaze. I think there are still a lot of Meteor apps using Blaze out there, probably more than those using Angular. A lot of those existing apps may want to use Apollo in order to switch to a different database.
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Hardly strange: audience/commercial potential of Angular | Blaze
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The “commercial potential” for Angular 2 is just that, potential. There already exists a population of Blaze users, possibly many of whom would want Apollo right now.
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Probably not so strange. MDG has stated that Blaze will be a community led effort going forward, and frankly React and Angular just have a bigger/more established user base. From a money perspective, it makes sense to go after a much larger audience…
But Apollo is more about expanding and reaching a ton more audience to grow their customer base… Meteor users are already a captive audience.
^ Josh’s points are underlined by MDG’s moves away from offering an ‘end to end’ solution to bring your own front end.
In the meantime the former offering works just great still.
For what it’s worth, I think getting it to work with Blaze won’t be so hard. We just need someone to step up who is interested in being the primary maintainer.
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This is exactly what the developers of Angular thought when they developed Angular 2;
Now they are surprised to learn that this “captive audience”, when it found out that it was needed to rewrite half of the code in order to migrate to Angular 2, preferred to migrate to React…
Before they started to develop Angular 2, almost nobody used React, and most of the popularity of React was created by the declaration that Angular 2 would not be compatible with Angular 1.
Frankly, I have no idea why MDG doesn’t use the popularity of Blaze to take the entire market; They have such a power in their hands, and just do anything they can in order to destroy it.
I ask many developers “why not Meteor?”, and all of them answer me that Meteor used to be a great framework till a year ago, and since then, MDG is too busy in shooting itself, so they (the developers I ask) don’t want to touch it.
It’s only a matter of time till we see the following title about Meteor in one of the leading blogs or news sites:
“The making, and unmaking, of the best framework in the world”…
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Blaze installs (from Atmosphere): 303,316
React installs (from npm): 372,528 … LAST WEEK
If I wanted to take over the entire market, I think I know which one I’d pick to integrate with first … 
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Note that npm and atmosphere download numbers can’t be compared because atmosphere counts unique apps and npm counts total downloads, but in general the point is valid.
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You should compare Meteor+Blaze vs. Meteor+React.
Nobody expects all of React developers, or a half of them, or even a quarter of them, to adopt Meteor just because it supports React.
And on the other hand, stopping the Blaze support will cause many developers to leave.
In any case, when I mentioned “popularity”, what I meant was:
The fact that you can easily develop a fullstack app, from end to end, after a very short training, without depending on many external packages, and almost without coding, and it will run multi-platform, including different web browsers and mobile.
This was a unique power that could not be challenged by anybody else, and it’s sad that instead of using it to win the competition, MDG loses it.
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I hear you - I was just throwing in a bit of tongue in cheek; that being said I think it’s really easy to understand Apollo’s decision to support React and Angular out of the box (going for the larger market share in this case makes a tonne of sense).
Right - they’re not directly comparable, but looking at developer interest alone (downloads) speaks volumes …
The above being said, I know we all love Blaze and would love to see it keep thriving. Hopefully we can all help rally behind the planned community lead future of Blaze. And this:
Is an awesome opportunity for someone! Not me of course … I’m too busy pretending to work and instead reading Meteor forum posts … by the time I actually get back to work, Vue will be the way forward! 
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Based on this poll Who uses what - Blaze/Angular/React/Vue - Poll Angular is no where to be seen and Blaze is still THE dominant technology for Meteor.
Blaze (which is built on Handlebars) remains a very strong UI as it is essentially the DOM with little abstraction and will continue to have its appeal (Ghost and other packages use Handlebars).
Personally, I think this is a ‘how to make money’ approach. MDG is now focusing on the data layer and less on the Meteor framework, so the community has to step in. I am willing to work with @mitar and the rest of the community on this.
Also, I believe that as a platform, Meteor in itself will see less and less investment from MDG regardless (the UI layer won’t solve that). So the community will HAVE to step in, even for React and Angular.
Side topic: I have a hard time believing you can make money just hosting Meteor, we spun up a DO VM for Meteor (with Clustering built in) and another DO for MongoDB and had a very solid infrastructure up in no time. Add Nagios and you have maintenance. MDG’s model may need to be redefined. If I am wrong about this, then great! One less thing that keeps me up at night.
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It’s time to sleep easy; when your primary investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Trinity Ventures, and Matrix Partners, you not only have a plan, your plan has been vetted by some serious heavy hitters.
Thanks @hwillson, no more hard liquor for me at night then 
Happy to see there is zero risk and life is peachy.
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