Geoff Schmidt (MDG CEO) here, with an update on MDG’s plans and priorities. For the most part this is a summary of the talk that Matt’s giving tonight at Meteor Night, so for more information check out the talk.
Our priorities
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Make Meteor the “best of JS”: continue to pull in the best components from around the JavaScript ecosystem, replacing Meteor-specific technology with industry standards as they march forward (eg, ES2015 modules in Meteor 1.3)
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Broaden Meteor core package development beyond MDG, increasing the number of outside contributors and finally broadening the core team beyond MDG employees (including commit bits)
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Support all databases, not just MongoDB, through an optional new data API based on reactive GraphQL
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Grow our commercial offering so that we have something valuable for every Meteor developer
Meteor
Meteor 1.3
Meteor 1.3 will be out in a few weeks. It’s a huge leap forward in our “best of JS” strategy, with initial support for importing npm packages on both the client and the server using the ES2015 module syntax. It’s also got a new official testing system (also based on ES2015 modules), an improved native mobile container (with both performance and hot code push improvements), build tool speed improvements, and more.
Meteor in npm
Once 1.3 is out we’re going investigate whether it’s time to start publishing Meteor core itself through npm. Our hope is that this will make it much easier to divide up the maintenance responsibility for Meteor (for example, splitting Blaze off as its own repository with its own maintainers, and not tying the version of every core package in lockstep to the Meteor release version).
New build tool
Though Meteor 1.3 makes significant improvements, the build tool has gotten slow with all of the fancy functionality that has been added to it over the years. We’re going to look into rebuilding it, possibly on top of an existing build engine (maybe Webpack?) The goal is faster rebuilds and support for the latest build technology such as code splitting.
Apollo
Our project to build a reactive GraphQL based data system now has a name: Apollo.
Apollo aims to be a complete data stack for modern apps, combining everything that’s good about Meteor with everything that’s good about GraphQL. It’s designed to be database agnostic so it can be used with SQL databases, MongoDB, existing REST services, or any other data source you may have. And it’s designed from the ground up to scale predictably to very large numbers of simultaneous clients.
Apollo will be released as a set of independent npm packages that you can add to any app, Meteor or otherwise. For Meteor apps built on Mongo and Livedata, you’ll be able to try out this new GraphQL-based approach incrementally, starting with just one or two parts of your app and porting more parts over if you like it.
We’re still in the early stages of Apollo and would love to have your feedback on our high level design, and soon, your code contributions.
Core team changes
Our company is now just about four years old and the Meteor core team has had very low turnover over the years. Going forward you can expect to see some changes, with some new faces joining and some familiar faces moving on to new things. In 2016 our biggest focus is Apollo and our team composition will reflect that.
The business
I’m proud to announce that MDG now has over 1000 customers. Given that the commercial side of MDG is only about half a year old I’m pretty pleased with that number. Thank you all so much for your support – we’re here because of you, and we can’t do it without you.
What’s next? The next stop is general availability of Galaxy Developer Edition, so everyone can take advantage of “zero devops” hosting for their Meteor app at a low pay-as-you-go price. Other forthcoming features include Let’s Encrypt (instant SSL certificates) and additional region support. Looking farther ahead, expect to see us offering a complete set of services and support around Apollo.
More information
As I type, Matt’s wrapping up an information packed talk at Meteor Night. For more details on the above, check it out!
