It seems that the future of meteor for front end is reactJs.
So i have a question, Is it possible that blaze template system will be deprecated?
If i will start making some app these days, is it safe to use blaze?
Thank you in advance!
I personally would not bet on it.
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It’s already been deprecated, in the sense that MDG is not actively developing Blaze anymore. Instead, the plan is for the community to take over - https://github.com/meteor/blaze/issues/13#issuecomment-223158027
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So we should not use blaze in any new project?
MDG is not clear, and put a lot of uncertainty behind this. React is safer, picking blaze means that at some point you might not be able to use some fundamental feature of meteor
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When you start to see the creators/maintainers of some of the biggest Blaze specific packages move over to React, I think it’s pretty clear which direction to head in …
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There is a real risk that this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough of us can see the Emperor’s new clothes then it will happen.
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Very true! One more risk to add to the list: The general consensus over at meteor/blaze has been to wait until Blaze has been split from Meteor, and is available via npm, before ramping up development on any new features/improvements/etc. Now that MDG has shifted the focus of 1.5 away from npm, Blaze development might be held up further …
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Ouch! Yes, I hadn’t made that connection.
Blaze does what we need, as well as being easy to learn and use. This makes it easier to train new developers. It also means our developers are more productive and this makes it faster for us to complete development tasks and make money - much like Meteor in general.
I’m sure many other people in the community would say the exact same thing.
I have looked at React and seen nothing but needless complexity required to obtain its purported performance gains. For us, faster rendering of changes to the DOM is not a bottleneck in any of our webapps.
Let’s keep maintaining and improving Blaze.
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Oh, I didn’t know that. They are moving away from NPM, or you mean that they finished NPM integration and they are now focusing on other things?
They’re putting the Meteor npm migration on hold for now, and have shifted the focus of 1.5 to be on Meteor/Apollo integration. See this comment from:
I cannot believe. They are again going back on their word? This is so problematic. One cannot plan anything with Meteor anymore.
I wrote my comment here: https://github.com/meteor/blaze/issues/20#issuecomment-233756555
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I’ve just thought the same a while ago, but to be honest, the future will be React or Angular 2 for the most of us here. Why? With React you can build web apps, desktop apps or even native mobile apps. You also have a big ecosystem. For a Cordova app we are using Onsen 2 and their React api. Which mobile framework would you use for Blaze? Right, there is no maintained one for Blaze. It doesn’t have enough users compared to React and so no one will optimize their own framework for it.
Blaze is nice if you do only pure web applications, but even here you have to think about the smaller ecosystem. To give you another example: Build a virtual list with 1000 dynamically items. It’s easy with React. Just install f.e react-list and pass the data to it, it will handle the rest for you. Now you do the same thing with Blaze - there are some jQuery plugins for a virtual list, but you don’t want to pass static elements to it but Blaze templates. Now you have a problem, because the library wasn’t optimized for Blaze support.
React may be much more complex than Blaze, but I absolutely love it’s ecosystem and it even works fine with Meteor.
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AFAIK, Apollo will work with Blaze. However, MDG has mentioned an intent to promote React over it as the primary. Still, I think Blaze is a gem and hope the community can help compensate for whatever it lacks. It meets all my needs without a problem.
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Basically MDG scrapped their old strategy, and will eventually scrap/abandon/depreciate (what have you) the tech stack we know of today as Meteor along with it – to be replaced in favor of a new enterprise strategy revolving around Apollo (and maybe Saturn).
As a small business owner/developer that’s perfectly happy with Blaze/Mongo and related tech; I have not the time or inclination to move to Apollo and React.
We don’t need MDG to make Blaze even better than it is today, we only need MDG to truly release Blaze and then step aside so that the community can put in the work making Blaze into what it has the potential to become.
UPDATE: According to @zoltan, “Meteor 1.4’s package unpinning feature will allow us to completely move blaze development over to the community repo without waiting for npm integration.”
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Qualia uses Blaze and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Lots of existing Meteor companies and projects use Blaze and will continue to do so. Even though Meteor has stopped developing Blaze, there will continue to be at least somewhat of a community.
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Can we still use Blaze even if it is deprecated ?
I mean like what the current status of Blaze right now is quite good …
so Whatever MDG decides on , can we still working with blaze ?
Exactly … what about if they did, would we be able to add blaze package to our project and proceed on ?
It’s still usable for me, but it does lack many features like two-way binding, which makes it complex to fetch data from a form. Blaze’s API design is not very good too. I would still continue to use it but I may suggest using ractive.js or Vue.