How I Migrated My App from Meteor

ramez · July 5, 2016, 5:51pm

Thanks.

Not trolling, wrong assumption. I want it to succeed, healthy concern is good.
Regardless of wrong assumptions, based on your numbers.

Point is, things are moving well. Thanks again.

mz103 · July 5, 2016, 8:52pm

You just said the same thing.

Let me refine it for your tastes: make a great tool for free, provide turn-key cloud-based solutions for that tool for a fee, provide consulting for that tool for a fee.

seba · July 5, 2016, 9:52pm

Back on topic: I was already surprised that remotebase (cool project BTW) was build on Meteor, since it doesn’t really seem to need much of its features. Anyway, you mention troubles with 200 concurrent users. You also mention a lot of things you did wrong with the configuration etc.
I just wonder if instead of rewriting the entire thing, it would have been easier to just solve to configuration mistakes you had made.
We run apps that have way more concurrent users and are more complex than remotebase on really unspectacular hardware. So I think with a few minor adoptions you should have been good.

maxhodges · July 6, 2016, 1:26am

Remotebase seems to tick all the right boxes for a static site. I’d probably have deployed it on Netlify, an ultra performant static site platform that gives you

Global CDN
Ultra Fast DNS
High Availability
Atomic Deploys
Instant Cache Invalidation
Security
Scalability
Automation

Oh did I mention free one-click SSL, form submission hooks (for your add a company feature) and GitHub integration?

See all the Netlify features here and read this if you’re not sure whether a static site is right for you.

To generate the pages, I’d probably have used Gatsby, a React.js static site generator with hot reloadable templates

It’s a pretty nice setup for continuous deployment. Committing a change to your repo triggers a Netlify build process to deploy a new version of your site. Fix a typo in seconds by editing a file in the GitHub mobile UI (I use CodeHub on iOS).

akryum · July 6, 2016, 8:57am

You can still write your application in meteor 1.3 just like you used to in 1.2. You don’t have to use npm nor import.

maxhodges · July 6, 2016, 10:12am

good point. It’s true, we still have many atmosphere packages in our production Meteor apps.

No more excuses @mats! Build something!

daslicht · July 12, 2016, 4:01pm

How about just using http://gun.js.org or http://horizon.io in conjunction with ReactJS, and backend what ever you like.

peterpetre · July 14, 2016, 8:11pm

There are plenty solutions out there to build up a full stack app and not that difficult. My main reason why i love Meteor is about community and what Meteor does. Web technologies change and new pop up everyday so following up all these stuff is really painful for me. Now when i have started using Meteor a year ago, i noticed that these guys (MDG) combine and bring up all the hot and best technologies out there in one place, and is community driven which means we can make this framework better and better over time. Following and be a part of a community and be updated as a developer makes me happier instead of spent crazy amount of hours, days, years on docs, etc to figure out and be updated on all these technologies out there. Cheers!

evolross · August 6, 2016, 5:36pm

Why would you have an admin app on two containers? Wouldn’t that have really low usage? Or do you mean like an “end-user” admin app for something?

Great comments @maxhodges! Very helpful.

maxhodges · August 7, 2016, 4:59am

Good question. Probably just for general redundancy/availability. It’s something that our backoffice team uses constantly throughout the day for purchasing, receiving, order fulfillment (shipping docs and labels), etc. So it’s more of a ERP-type backend than a simple ‘admin’ app. You can see from this screenshot that there’s a lot to it

arutune · August 14, 2016, 8:49pm

Yes, about half year ago I realized that Meteor is a dead end, at least for me and felt really happy to come back to Backbone+React+Java+SQL stack.
The most serious disadvantage from a development/project management standpoint - Meteor is unpredictable in development. Example - in SPA REST stack you can always look at the data being sent and responses you get, but with Meteor it becomes a blind spot, until you log everything on the server! So it’s very hard to predict, how much time it will take to root a problem in your code, fix bugs etc. Same with UI development - because of 2-6 seconds of reload time, eventually you realize how painful is it to be fast and witty with your UI (HTML, CSS) - in UI it’s especially important to try different looks to nail it, but with all reloads one simple yet polished feature can easily take days and you end up with unexpectedly more time to develop trivial UI.

These things do put your project at a very high risk - and that is the reason why employed project managers will always stay away from Meteor. As one of my ex-bosses simply put it - “there is too much magic in your code, and I hate magic - it’s too irrational!”
I do not even touch user experience here, just developer’s/PM’s. I wish I knew all these little aha’s in advance, but it’s OK - experience, enjoy!

aruntk · December 16, 2016, 5:00pm

@AndreasGalster @netmask checkout https://github.com/aruntk/polymer-apollo.

An example of a client-side app built with Polymer and Apollo Client - https://github.com/aruntk/GitHunt-Polymer

maxhodges · December 28, 2016, 6:26am

what makes you think all these project manager are now unemployed?

I get that you decided Meteor isn’t right for you; but I think you’re mistaken to think it couldn’t be right for anyone. Plenty of people, including myself, have done great things with Meteor. There are more than 35K Meteor repositories on GitHub and there are more JavaScript repos on GitHub than any other language. Part of the reason behind that is the rise of Node.js, and IBM and others are pushing Node.js into the enterprise where Java/SQL(Oracle) have traditionally played a large role.

I think if you told us what specific problems you were encountering, perhaps we could have provided specific advice. But your problem description isn’t really specific enough for us to know how to help. We’ve built multiple, successful, commercial Meteor apps and haven’t had the kind of trouble you’re describing. So maybe you have some specific needs, or maybe you’re just not aware of how to deal the some aspects of Meteor app dev?

I don’t even understand this concern. Our app doesn’t reload pages. The UI performance is blazing fast and so is our development time.