Hi,
I am currently writing me Bachelor thesis about Meteor. I wanted to know if there is a timeline of what happened in Meteor and who where the main participants.
The wikipedia and its references are very small for such a promissing project…
Well, if you visit https://info.meteor.com/blog and keep clicking on next, you will see the history of Meteor roll before your eyes (in reverse order, but hey!).
Herewith, the first post: http://info.meteor.com/blog/first-preview announcing Skyfall (as it was called back then).
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While it is true that the blog contains a lot of information, it is difficult to get an overview of the relevants steps of what is Meteor now. But I will have to dive in this mess… RIP my right hand
Well, you could dive into Git and check the commit history - but I think you’d be gone for a l-o-o-o-o-n-g time!
Purely anecdotal, but maybe you can find the sources or someone can correct:
From what I know, the guys behind Meteor started out as a YC-backed travel application. The feature of the app was that it’s real-time. When they demoed it, people were impressed by its real-time nature (and keep in mind, this is like 5 years ago).
The app ultimately failed, but people were interested in the technology, and thus, Skybreak (?) was born. Then, after the team gave a talk somewhere, I believe it was YC demo day, someone walked up to them and said they have this domain called Meteor.com, and offered it to them.
Meteor started off as a closed source product, where the license implied something like “you’ll owe us a bit of your revenue, as we agree.” Naturally, the open source community pushed for an MIT license, and then the its been version after version of updates, then 1.0 happened.
For what happened since 1.0 and now, Geoff recently gave a talk at MDG that’s worth finding. I think all of his talks are a good watch.
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You can get a lot of history from the official blog with release announcements. The oldest milestones include but are not limited to:
- Authorization and authentication was not present in the first public release in April 2012. Got full authorization and authentication built-in in October 2012 in version 0.5.0
- Scalability of the real-time component got addressed in November 2012 0.5.1 first, still didn’t scale well horizontally
- Scalability of the real-time component got addressed again with new Oplog Tailing approach in versions 0.7.0, 0.7.1 and 0.7.2 starting in December 2013
- Didn’t have npm support until April 2013 v.0.6.0
- The front-end real-time rendering component got a big improvement with virtual DOM diffing and a future for components in April 2014 v.0.8.0. Now comparable with ReactJS and HTMLBars!
Might check hacker news if you want the community impressions – or initial impressions with the framework. I’m happy to say that this is how I found out about Meteor. Some core Meteor Dev’s openly discuss meteor here.
Between websockets creating a platform shift on the web, the innovations in the JavaScript world, and the funding, I’d say Meteor has been a “lucky” product. Combined with the hard work of the company and the talented team, it’s clear why they were able to race ahead of the competitors like Derby, etc.
Since this article resurfaced due to the new categories. If you’re interested to know about Meteor’s past I recommend that you go through Geof Schmidt answers on Quora. Meteor was partially inspired by a framework called Luna which inverts the concept of latency compensation. Really interesting stuff.