Hello all! I wanted to take a minute and introduce myself and say “hello”. I am a full-time web developer and my main focus is PHP using Laravel (3+ years). As you may know, the Laravel community has quickly adopted Vue as their front-end library of choice. I have used it a couple of times but it has always felt a little awkward to me. I’m not blaming that on Vue but more of my taste in developer experience. After looking around for quite some time, I found Meteor and decided to give it a try. I have been reading the docs, guides, forum posts and watching some tutorials and must say that I am loving it so far. I have built a couple of practice apps with it and I truly feel like Meteor is to JS what Laravel is to PHP - it just feels so good writing code with Meteor and I feel like I am falling in love with coding all over again (not that I ever fell out of love with it ).
Anyhow, I am very excited to continue learning Meteor and I appreciate you taking the time to for this introduction.
@dericcain welcome to the club, I had the same background as you, only I worked for over 7 years with Java / PHP stack. Meteor speaked to me as a developer. There is nothing out there like it. And when I say nothing, there trully is nothing.
Try creating a “live” application in LAMP stack, with latency compensation and everything.
People worry about performance when it comes to Meteor, and that MongoDB is not relational. These were the 2 main problems me and other devs solved:
Check this out, if you want to remove the hassle of relational data.
I can also recommend angular which is a perfect addition in the frontent to the meteor framework.
There are also very nice tutorials here: https://angular-meteor.com/
Meteor rules them all in its class! I am really enjoying building amazing apps with it - Galaxy deployed. I am glad I also found a great community around it. Thanks
I’m confused how you didn’t need to deal with DevOps for LAMP projects. Can you explain that a bit more? I’m curious because anytime I did LAMP in the past, I definitely had to go through a setup phase for the 4 parts and then some
I mean no DevOps in a relative sense. Compared to Node, I felt that LAMP DevOps were trivial. Today most of my work is in Elixir/Erlang, and I long for the simplicity of LAMP deployment.
Your Linux flavor can change things… I am in the RedHat/CentOS world. I use the battled tested WHM/Cpanel tools. WHM sets up Apache and PHP through EasyApache, manages MySQL through its Wizard, and controls most other server and service processes including firewalls.
Many hosts provide reasonably priced managed LAMP solutions. If you go with a managed LAMP host, you don’t need to touch WHM/Cpanel or any command line fun. Managed LAMP VPSs on good machines are $50/month with 6GB, 150GB of local file storage, ample shared processors, MySQL already configured, Email configured, etc. Most of us Node folks pay $50/month just for the database! Then we need AWS S3, hosting, Bitbucket/GitHub, Email, Jenkins/CI… the money suck is real.
Most solo and small team LAMP devs develop on the server. We all can agree that’s bad practice, but it is dead simple (until something goes wrong ). There’s a huge learning curve moving from a FTP -> Save Changes -> Reload page development pipeline to the convoluted GIT (and all of its overhead) -> Node build -> Continuous Deployment (or manual build – gasp!).
Finally, a Node crash (typically) brings down the entire web application. That’s downright terrifying to the LAMPer. Learning process managers like PM2 adds to the overhead.
Services like Heroku and Galaxy abstract a lot of the above pain. But, they do it at a high cost. If you’re willing and able to pay the price, the DevOps transition isn’t so bad. However, if you’re on a tight budget, the Node DevOps can be steep learning curve.
