I’ve been working in web technologies for like 3 years but I’ve never worked in any of the javascript frameworks so I’m new for this area. I’ve expertise in core PHP and it’s frameworks.
I’ve to make a project which is almost like TaskRabit (https://www.taskrabbit.com/). The project will be developed in four phases:
Admin Panel for the site (Back-end)
Website (Front-end)
Writing services for smart phone apps
Android+IOS app
I have read about node js, Express and Hapi. I have some idea about each one of these and meteor also that Node is suitable for I/O bound projects. My questions are:
Is it possible to make this project in meteor? If no, then what JavaScript frameworks would be sufficient enough to deal with this kind of projects? or is it a right choice to make such a project in any of these JavaScript frameworks?
I’ve been using relational databases with Php but is it possible to manage the data of such project in a NoSql database like mono db?
This is Sanjay Kumar from Deligence Technologies. We were working in PHP/MySQL from years and from last 1.5 years we started working with Meteor and I can assure you that Meteor will be a good choice for your project.
You can use MongoDB for this type of project. It won’t be an issue.
Can you tell me if there are any other technical issues, I should be more cencerned about?
and secondly is this project also feasible to made in any other javascript frameworks like express?
You will have no problem creating that kind of project in Meteor. And, if you are like me, the Javascript world will be a breath of fresh air after PHP.
It will be no problem managing the data. You will likely find that MongoDB is, in many cases, more convenient than SQL. Our last version of our software was SQL, and newer Meteor version is Mongo, and we did have to change techniques slightly on some of our async calls, but overall Mongo gave us no major problems.
Express can make pretty much anything, but it takes more work to do that. If offers much more basic functionality than Meteor will.
Honestly, the only potential issue I can see users in your place having with Meteor is hosting - and if your project is a serious one, that is not an issue. Now, you can do something like just grab a Digital Ocean droplet and set it up on there - but deployment is a bit more difficult as you are doing it manually. Meteor has the Galaxy hosting option - which if possible I highly recommend. It’s around $26-28 a month, but it makes deployment dead-easy. Just 1-2 lines in the console, and give it ~5 mins, and your app is deployed.
For hobbyist projects, the price is a little steep, as hobbyists don’t usually want to spend more thna $5-10 a month, but for any “serious” project, it’s more than worth the price. Emergency bug-fixes/deployments are so easy, and because of the ease of use, we deployed our live app and started use on Nov 11th, and since then have released 42 updates. This is a MUCH greater pace than our old app. Galaxy is a lot of what makes it possible.
Aside from that, you should be able to achieve anything you need in Meteor, and once you get the hang of it, it’s quite pleasurable to use! I honestly dread every time I have to go back to PHP nowdays!
Thank you so much for this much explanation. It really encouraged me to make this project in meteor as before I was a bit confused.
Thanks a lot for your time, again!
I believe there won’t be any technical issues. As you are new to Meteor - there will be a lot of learning and there will be frustration at time as some times - things will take longer than you’ll expect as you are new.
I believe yes, But I won’t be able to comment on which one will be good choice other than Meteor as I haven’t used any other JS Framework
I’m big fan of Meteor and I’d recommend it anytime and I’ve little experience in php.
However I’d like to understand the rational of the folks migrating off php to node.js in general a little better…what were them main reasons for your decision ? and what’s your impression on a framework like laravel now they’ve adopted vue.js…
I’ve also come to Meteor/Javascript from PHP. One thing that you can’t do in many PHP frameworks, is a single-page web app. As you may know, this is a web app where much of the app is in javascript that runs in the client browser. After the initial app load, app operations are very fast, and hits to the server are lower in data transfer size because they are primarily for data rather than for full html/css/javascript web pages. This makes a Meteor app a much better experience for users.
Evidently it is possible to build a single-page web apps with Laravel/PHP. But with Meteor, using javascript on the client and the server, you avoid the mental context-switching costs of working in two different languages.
No doubt I love working in Laravel and I think possibly everything can be made in it but as you know that all I/O functions in Javascript (file reading, database calls, API calls etc) are asynchronous procedures, whereas Php gets executed sequentially. There are many other benefits of JS as it’s efficient and you have to program only in one language while working in node and top of that I know a lot of people around me who switched to Node after working years of years in Php and they are really happy with their decision.
