Meteor + Aurelia, A marriage made in Heaven?

1

I spent some 8 months developing with Meteor using Blaze and I had no real complaints. Stuff worked, and I found the support I needed. Angular and REACT was coming on very strong, and as I was working on other projects I was looking forward to stepping back into a scenario in 6 months or so where things would be Cleared Up. Was I wrong!

OR AM I STUPID || CRAZY??

I have spent now, some 4-5 days trying to think what I thought remotely exciting about React, and except for totally trivial examples have fallen flat on my face. Their Documentation is not working for me somehow. The combination is just NOT working for me, but I have been reluctant to go back to Blaze (for my particular project).

WORSE?!

With all the Searching and Reading I ran across Aurelia - lots of activity - and my first impressions were really very positive. Ah-ha! Aurelia on the font-end, Meteor on the back-end ==> A marriage made in Heaven!

    I'm not the only one - here's a blog posting along the same line:   
    [Why Aurelia over React & Angular](http://dustindavis.me/why-aurelia-over-angular-react-ember-meteor/)

And sure enough 8 Atmosphere packages with Aurelia in their Tags! I was really really hopeful that I could get something working.

One or two of this packages used TS. One the REadme and code commented in Spanish. The others are pretty old and have failed to run with the new version Meteor for one obscure missing file or another at some stage of install.

====================================

I think I am close to concluding that if The Meteor Development Group does not make it a priority to maintain, document, test, and to some extent support this particular Pair then, something really good will be lost.

NOTE: I’m absolutely no expert, have not even been trying to keep up with Trends and Directions for months, and appreciate confusing comprises necessary to steer this Meteor through space and time! However, over the years I have come to trust my instincts, and have had to rely, often successfully on not too much more than superficial impressions. It is clear, however, that other Meteor Folks have seen this particular pair as belonging together somehow.

I’d really appreciate some larger view comments about this particular combination, the potential, and if there is any chance of getting some “official” on-going support,

Note! There seems to be rather heavy world wide interest in Aurelia these days:

on git: over 8,000 stars, 494 watching

& on npmjs: 890 downloads in the last day

890 downloads in the last day
5,488 downloads in the last week
22,235 downloads in the last month

Pretty impressive? So, this is not just me…

Thanks,

George

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2

Just go for React. What makes react like no other is that it belnds js and html in a single file. Which makes things simpler.

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3

Aurelia.js is not “officially” supported by the Meteor Team. I had the same experience with vue-meteor due to a lack of proper tutorial.

Your quoted blog post is old. A lot things changed since December 2015 in Angular 2.

The Angular-Meteor 2 tutorial has recently been updated. Give it a try:

https://www.angular-meteor.com/tutorials/socially/angular2/bootstrapping

4

Would also recommend you to go with React. Don’t forget that you are able to build native apps with React, too (React Native).

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5

Thanks, guys, for comments!

THE STATE OF THINGS: After almost 2 weeks of banging head I have now found some real Traction, I needed a starting point with non-trivial example that I can relate to.

I found this demo project yesterday, it is a Solitair game written in the Aurelia Framework.

Solitaire Demo Project in Aurelia

When I make changes they just behave as I’d expect. The overall program structure just makes sense to me, not as much mysterious boilerplate (or so my impression). The IDE is playing exceptionally well and fast with the Browser - (not a fair comparison because no big DB getting restarted every time something is tweaked). Error messages are to a very high, Meteor like, standard… all in all I’m just happy right now.

With METEOR I really truly, as a team of one, enjoyed / appreciated the mature/powerful CLI with -YAAAAA - a working Deploy. So my Aurelia folder is still inside my Meteor folder :slight_smile: Will only give that up most reluctantly on seeing the world this way. I shall take another look at React & Angular 2.

Immediate plan is to try and add buttons and other really cool things (from Materialize?) to this Demo App.

As a many year programmer I feel, somehow, that this is allowing me to play to my strength of knowing and appreciating good and clean OO code when I see it. However, believe me JSX makes sense to me too.

BOTTOM LINE: It could well happen that what I’m learning with Aurelia will help me see the big picture for React or Angular, I only know that I am now a Fish happy to be in Water again!

George

6

One more comment: When I discovered Ruby back in the day, I had this feeling that I somebody had read my mind, and that all I had to do was ask myself “How would I have done that?” and that’s how it worked, or it would be different, and I’d think, usually, “ahhh - ok - that’s even better”!

That’s how I felt about Meteor when I found it compared to other Frameworks.

But coming back, and stepping into this Blaze-React-Angular dynamic triangle of pasts and futures has really just thrown me for a Loop!

I do think I understand how things got to this point, but it has been just wasting my cycles!

7

Hi gkoller, I love Aurelia and I love Meteor, it was nice to follow this discussion. Maybe a good idea to try them together.

Just came across this discussion Why Aurelia over Angular, React, Ember or Meteor and there is this package mentioned: tsumina:meteor-aurelia.

8

Uhm, blending js and html in a single file is really no guarantee for simplicity. React also makes a lot of things very difficult and devs should really think about using React over other solutions instead of blindly following the hype.

React can be good for huge apps, like Facebook (and especially good for Facebook, see the recent license discussions on HN). Personally I find a lot of things in React overcomplicated, especially for smaller apps.

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9

Hi, that’s where I was 1 year ago. I actually thought the same thing: React over-complicates things and makes them hard. I’m not going with the hype.

However from what you are saying I know for a fact you haven’t used React that much because it’s really simpler even for smaller apps.

I was kinda forced to do a project with React, and that’s how I began to love it.

Give it a chance.

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const comp = ({hello})=>{
   return (
      <div>{hello}</div>
   );
};

What’s complicated with that ?

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11

what about:

export default ({hello}) => (
    <div>{hello}</div>
);

:wink:

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12

Hi Madrus,

Aurelia is, per my understanding, was written with full (inside) knowledge of the weaknesses of Angular 2 from the ground up in ES16 (see Rob Eisenberg). This gives Aurelia native modules, classes, decorators and more being used internally but also extendable by module authors / hopefully also more typical project programmers as myself.

(Yes, decorators now. But I’m not there yet…)

I’m ready to believe this, but all I actually know is that after bouncing off the Meteor + React (although I was looking for love!) and Meteor + Angular tutorials / examples / on-line docs) I have found some rather exciting to me traction with Aurelia. I’m not going down this path because of an extra pair of unexpected curly brackets - I’m doing this because Aurelia is just making sense to me so far…

I hope the Meteor Decision Makers are watching and thinking about Aurelia. Somehow, it is my impression tha rather than adding to the current mess, it might be that Aurelia is already pointing to where things have to go, not to chase endless hype, but to get things where they need to go to stay at the true state-of-the-art sooner than later.

My project won’t wait for es7 :slight_smile:

George

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13

Hi Again Madrus,

Meant to mention that I quickly checked out every one of the Aurelia “bridge” packages including

tsumina/meteor-aurelia

which, btw, is TS based, while I’m thinking I want to stay with ES.

All the atmosphere bridging to Aurelia seem dead or stalled for now. My new project can be approached from “front-end-first” and job #1 seems to be to get examples to work for learning… so I’m going straight up Aurelia for now, assuming that I can work my way back into using meteor for deployment and all later.

I’ll tell you I really don’t like making this kind of assumption.

14

Hi George (@gkoller), fully agree on Aurelia and Rob Eisenberg. My feelings altogether. Even about TypeScript. ES6 feels more natural although intellisense can be of great help.

Can we get in touch off topic?

Andre

15

The excitement is increasing as I start to dig… have you poked around in the node_modules yet?

Guess what?

I am seeing just really beautiful code imho, ordered, named, and built using the same logical/simple & self consistent conventions that I am also looking to USE. So I’m getting two for one: not only learning how the framework operates, but I’m also seeing/learning tested/working ES6 constructions and, best practices (I am assuming).

============

Did you find the Cheat Sheet yet?

[Aurelia Cheat Sheet](https://www.cheatography.com/erikch/cheat-sheets/aurelia-getting-started/)
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16

Yes, I did find the Cheat Sheet. I have also created a couple of simple projects in Aurelia + ASP.NET Core. But you have triggered my curiosity putting Aurelia next to Meteor. :slight_smile:

17

This is also what I am looking for. I feel exactly the same, I really don’t want to create my next project with React and Aurelia makes so much sense to me (Just like Meteor did when I found it). If someone has any information on how to get meteor to play well with Aurelia let me know. I think I will start use only Aurelia and later merge it into a Aurelia/Meteor project if possible.

18

React is extremely testable, that is why I love it paired with Meteor. I can TDD my brains out like no other stack I’ve worked with.

I have no experience with Aurelia. Does it offer a great testing experience?

19

I will only say that what I liked about Aurelia, I think I found with Vue
now, and after a rather intensive month plus of actual project development
using it, I feel like it was the right choice for me, and the right time.
Further, I wasn’t ready to believe it, but I have successfully used Surge
to deploy my still static project in seconds after a $npm run build. Up
and running! Free. Seconds. Magic (to me, anyway). But, obviously no DB
involved at this point…

There is an effort, one way or another to bring Meteor and Vue together,
not sure how current or well maintained it might be.

My solution actually uses Vue + Vuex, and there are multiple nicely
integrated components libraries to select from. Vuex is not for everyone,
it can be frustrating, but I think it has forced me into using a project
into a highly modular template that my project can grow with… so far so
good anyway.

Best!

George

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20

We realize there are other great frontend frameworks available, as mentioned above. This thread is specifically discussing the possibility of using Aurelia with Meteor, so please help us keep on topic.

Lets collaborate to get first class Aurelia examples for the Meteor community. The tsumina:meteor-aurelia package hasn’t seen a release since 2015, so there may be an opportunity to release a new version. Perhaps we can package a Meteor-Aurelia package on NPM?