Hey everyone, I’m curious to hear what everyone’s thoughts are on the viability of Mantra now that MDG has released the official guide. Their recommended approach seems quite different than Mantra’s.
I’m interested to see who prefers the architecture laid out by Mantra vs MDG, and which one will be more prevalent. Would love to hear what Arunoda as well as someone from MDG thinks of this.
There’s another topic about this here:
But that one didn’t get much traction either. Really interested to know what people think, ideally both resources are useful in different ways!
Personally, I haven’t bought the book because of this. With all the options out there it gets confusing for new people to come on board and I think they tend to stick with what MDG puts out. ie. the guides, tutorials, etc…
Basically Mantra is not a boilerplate, but a set of guidelines to build client side apps. (We have some recommendations for server side as well)
Mantra is built for production apps (mid/enterprise scale) if we want to work a bit harder to get better productivity and maintainability.
So, if you are building a toy app (just for a hackathon), Mantra may not the solution for you.
We also value a set of principles and try to minimize the use of Meteor packages (we give focus for NPM modules a lot)
We can test the whole app without running Meteor at all. That’s possible because of how we architect Mantra.
We can assure that you don’t need to do major changes to your app architecture for the next 2-3 years. (That’s the first case, we built it)
Finally tools. Mantra has a CLI and IDE integration(Atom).
We are releasing React Storybook today and if you follow Mantra, using that is pretty straightforward.
Just like that, there’ll be many tools.
This is how I think about this topic.
By the way there are no paid meteor books produced by the authors of mantra or officially sponsored by MDG. So perhaps you are referring to discover meteor, but that book is not officially affiliated with the developers of meteor.
I think he means the React + Meteor book from @kenrogers and I also think it should be renamed Discover Mantra 
I personally found Mantra to be too abstract. As a developer, I like knowing what’s going on in my app and to properly use mantra, one needs to dig into it quite deep and it is not a fairly easy task. What I found out for myself, when I did that, is Mantra is not designed for Meteor. It looks a lot like a carefully and intelligently designed escape hatch where one can easily switch out Meteor for another backend.
I also believe the wording with “it is for production scale mid/engerprise apps” to be very very very misleading.
Given that all developers on a team are very familiar with how Mantra works behind the scenes, it can be a very valuable “discipline” for getting multiple people to work on the same UI codebase. But that’s not mutually exclusive!
I also believe the wording with “it is for production scale mid/engerprise apps” to be very very very misleading.
I agree. I’m in the final stage of the React Tutorial for Mantra Tutor. After that, I’m working on a BulletProof Meteor like Mantra tutorial. So, getting started with Mantra will pretty simple.
It looks a lot like a carefully and intelligently designed escape hatch where one can easily switch out Meteor for another backend.
Yes. That’s true. We don’t wanted to get away from Meteor. But, we knew something like Apollo is coming and we are marching towards NPM. So, we designed a way to work with that. That’s Mantra.