So, a Meteor is a prototype toy and a Next is a serious engine for adults guys?
Oh! I didn’t say that exactly. Frankly, I’m not sure what happened in the Meteor land in last couple of years.
We already knew problems of Meteor etc.
I think the main issue was the tight MongoDB integration. Most of the companies who adopted Next.js already had their own data layer, so integrating it with a simple framework like Next.js is a no-brainer for them.
On the other hand, other set of users like to use CMSs. Then Next.js/Gatsby is a great combination.
We still see a lot of companies still use polling for make near realtime changes. I hope it’s easy to manage that in the infra side.
I also think, it’s about the timing and focus as well. Next.js focus on only one thing.
Serving pages. And it does that really great.
About timing: MDG started to focus on Apollo and Next.js joined with the React hype.
Also I didn’t even involve with Next.js for the last 2 years. I was so busy working at Vercel on Infra.
But, I just felt it’s time to do some open-source contributions.
At the company I now work for, this low level consideration is the primary driver of tech decisions. Technically, we could use Meteor, even when not using Mongo. But they won’t even look at it, because it seems so full stack. The sad thing is, Meteor’s vertical integration (primarily its build system, and legendary backward compatibility which makes evergreen development such a breeze) would save everyone a lot of time. It’s just a hard sell without that focused purpose messaging.
Have you been working with GraphQL much the last little while? Your learngraphql course is what originally got me interested in it back back in 2016, and have been working with it full time since 2017 or so.
It was a huge inspiration for me, and you’ll always have my appreciation. Thank you so much!
Your information is way out of date. Meteor is doing just fine now thank you.
The main problem we had over the last few years was wasting our energy dealing with losers spreading anti-Meteor FUD.
It is also unfortunate that a personality cult had developed around your name and a number of people reacted with ongoing public expressions of hysterical mourning and gloom after you announced your departure.
Both those groups of people are gone and we have been enjoying peace and progress again thanks to all the loyal long-time contributors and the new leadership of Tiny.
Since we began using Meteor in 2015, it has remained the most productive framework we have ever used to build webapps.
Here in Australia, my business has been using the Meteor classic stack (Meteor, Blaze, DDP, Pub/Sub, Iron Router) together with MySQL. We have implemented several commercial web apps that are used for tracking delivery drivers in real-time all over the country with infrastructure costs 10x-100x lower than our competitors.
I appreciate your past contributions and welcome you back. I have one polite request:
Please use your influence and talents for iterative, incremental improvements that remain true to the original vision of Meteor. We don’t want to lose what we have and see Meteor transformed into a different product under the same name.
If you want to pursue your own vision, it is better than you create your own fork under a new name.
And other features and community contributions (others, sorry if forgot your contribution, please share it, a lot of stuff now that I think about it)
And the incredible thing is that all those features were added in a backward-compatible way, a real engineering achievement, I think, given how much JS and the rest of the ecosystem changed, thanks to the genius of Benjamin, one of the best developers I’ve ever come across, and also the contribution of many community members.
In my opinion, the main problem with Meteor that it was way ahead of its time and a very ambitious project, developing very quickly, and wasn’t given enough time to mature (de-couple the architecture, support other DBs, and correct the flaws, etc).
That seems very true but a lot of us (at least here) want to serve rich applications/apps and not just pages, and would like the framework to handle more. I really hope this doesn’t get interpreted as NextJS hate.
I agree.
Once again, good to see you here Arunoda, you’ve a big fan base of your work, myself included.
If you want to pursue your own vision , it is better than you create your own fork under a new name.
I think his blog post there is pretty precise. Meteor has not moved much since then and the comunity is still fragmented (react vs blaze vs angular vs vue and ddb-pub-sub vs graphql vs grapher or even vs ddp-method-calls).
I think its now a chance for meteor to unify the community once again, go back to the roots, be more opinionated. Move good community packages to the core (grapher, a router?, redis-oplog (optional)), fix the datalayers problems (global nature of mini-mongo, no strong type support, sometimes awkward integration in ui-libraries) and have every important package be maintained.
Thanks Arunoda for sharing your thoughts. Actually, I also missed you when you left, since you were one of my main inspirations at that time, and I learned a lot from you. I don’t expect you to work with Meteor again, but it’s great to see you here.
One great package missing from this list is meteor-desktop which adds Electron as a first-class build target. My business relies heavily on this and it’s a fantastic way to get a Meteor app bundled as a cross-platform desktop application.
That’s a really poor attitude towards someone who literally gave years of their life working for free to build the foundations for a good chunk of the Meteor ecosystem.
Shooting the messenger and blaming people who point out Meteor’s issues might feel good, but it’s not going to do one bit to fix these very real issues, and it’s not a great look for you.
Actually, I’ve to agree with @vlasky on this one, he made a factual observation, at least to my mind.
There is indeed a lot of misinformation and FUD around Meteor (and also valid criticism), and there is a personality cult around his name.
People who never used the tech, sitting on the fence repeating what everyone else is saying even inside the Meteor forum despite clear facts, it is a waste of energy and they are indeed losers, they lost an opportunity to use their time/energy better and build something profitable with the tech, instead of just fiddling around with JS frameworks.
I don’t think vlasky statements undermine Arunoda (and his team) work, they are very factual and so his contribution. But @vlasky work has been undermined by misinformation and FUD, he has been saying there is SQL support for years yet he/we gets the same false rehearsed messages (it does not scale, no SQL support, nextjs/x is better, it’s for toy projects, it’s not secure, and the infamous declaration it is dead…)
We (as a community) keep complaining about the FUD outside the Meteor forum, yet inside the forum, we don’t make the effort to correct the misinformation. So I’ve to agree with @vlasky on this one.
He was making a profit (Kadira/MUP) and I think he would have made more money if he waited little more especially with GitHub sponsorship, I’m willing to bet that the entire Meteor community would have paid him (even now if he decides to contribute again), it was indeed a loss and I think MDG has a large part to play with it.
I guess if you’re charitable you can read his post in a better light, but I thought the overall tone (calling people “losers”) was unwarranted. Anyway I don’t want to derail the discussion in a negative way so my apologies if I overreacted.
I need to restart my vue ddp project again 
