Feathers for data fetching

Planet Earth
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I wasn’t trying to start another thread by asking @kalyes what feathers js is.

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@aadams http://feathersjs.com/

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Holy fuck I’m in.

Meteor has been giving me huge problems lately.

Update: their CLI is insane.

Edit: nvm it has no staying power.

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@mz103 how can you say that? From what I heard in this video, it’s just a stitching together of long-time very-stable packages like node, express, socketio, passport, and react/react native.

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Mhh…Feathers sounds interesting, especially the database part. But what about scaling a Feather app? I can’t find any information about it in their docs, only, that it is possible.

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I’m a ghost :grinning: - no, I’ve just clicked the link here.

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@xta yeah, ok. Well this thread is buried so I won’t be posting here much, but I may create a new thread if I get the inclination.

I just found out about feathers js yesterday. Watch the video where @joshowens asks about scaling.

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What are feathers advantages over meteor?

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@vyky take the time to watch this video with the very reputable @joshowens and then get back to us.

If this project had been around about 1.5 years ago, I think I might have looked really hard at using it for my startup over Meteor. Maybe I wouldn’t be in the position of having to do a rewrite away from Blaze/Livedata now if it had.

By the way, it’s telling that this thread has been buried by MDG.

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I’m not understanding what you mean here. How is moving this conversation into its own thread with its own title burying it? Right now it’s way more visible and focused than it was when it was (buried) deep inside another thread.

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He created the thread but made it to where it does not surface to the top when a new post is added – hence buried. It will just drop further and further down the stack.

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Thanks for the video mention :smiley:

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You got it brother. Let’s keep the solidarity.

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This is because of the interaction of two things:

  1. I moved it to Planet Earth, because it doesn’t fit the rest of the categories on the forum, which are all about Meteor-specific discussion
  2. Planet Earth isn’t on the front page unless you opt into it, because it is used as a place to discuss things that are completely unrelated to Meteor
3 Likes
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  1. I was simply asking a question in another thread, what is Feathers.js, and didn’t want to start a discussion about it really. Next time please just send me a note and I’ll delete the question if you don’t want talk of Feathers.js in this forum.

  2. I don’t know what you mean by “I moved it to Planet Earth”.

Edit: Ah, now I see what you mean by Planet Earth. :wink:

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I think it should go without saying that threads on a forum should stay on topic. Sometimes it happens naturally, in which case a good option is to move the thread out later.

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could you share an objective quick +/- of feathers vs meteor from your experience, for devs who want the best of both worlds?

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Feathers is Express with some goodness sprinkled on top. This means that packages and patterns from the huge Express ecosystem just work. That’s a very smart design decision.

You can pick and choose which feathers modules you want to use. You can even add them to an existing Express app a la carte. In a sense, Feathers is what Meteor is moving toward, without the drag of technical debt and a legacy code base.

  • Scaling: A standard feathers REST config is stateless. The gold standard for scaling. They don’t say much about it because there’s not much more to say.

  • Authentication: Just use PassportJS. Or whatever you want. It’s Express. Requires more setup than Meteor, but is also more flexible.

  • Databases: use whatever you want. No restrictions, with pretty tight Meteor-style integration for a nicer dev experience.

  • ‘Reactivity’ & Meteor-style pub-sub: Possible and easy with the websockets module. Or you could use Apollo with it. You have the flexibility of using whatever stack you want.

  • Build tools: For any config that uses babel, typescript etc., you bring your own. This means that they can be superior to Meteor’s build tool in speed, flexibility etc. However, you’re responsible for configuring them. For beginners, this can be a hurdle. For ease of getting up and running and focusing on the business logic, Meteor really shines.

  • Support: There’s a lot of documentation for Feathers. The core team is very responsive on Github. And it’s important to remember that it’s just Express, for which there’s been a massive amount written. On the other hand, Meteor has invested a lot in this area, and @sashko is hard to beat. MDG is also a company that can offer professional support. Feathers is still an open source project.

1 Like
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thanks - very helpful. got the general architecture differences. perhaps also seeking an opinionated take on the intimate developer ‘zen’ (or lack of) that can only come from investing significant time building on both+others. stuff that wouldn’t be easily distilled into a feature list (e.g. from the pure spec list, feathers doesn’t read much different than sails, hapi, etc, yet i’m sure there’s more than meets the eye even within the express world).

from my limited view it seems seamlessness of building+hosting is the major consideration between meteor as a ‘full stack’ and other more modular js stacks. knowing just how painful the sequence of {integrating, launching, hosting, monitoring, scaling, maintaining} can be even in a time of aws, heroku, etc seems like the x-factor if you are focused on baking delicious recipes rather than messing around with the oven.