No offence, but frankly I don’t understand how 10 minutes of creating and account and copying and pasting mongo url is considered for advanced geeks? If that’s too complex, how will then they build and deliver a mobile or web app? there’re legitimate concerns and areas of improvement but that one I really struggle to understand.
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Would it be easier to write a prototype in Meteor 1.0 / 1.2? Sure it would. Would it be easier to write a maintainable website that you can safely make your source of income? No.
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If it’s easy in Meteor 1.0, it’s identically easy in Meteor 1.2.1 or Meteor 1.4. Meteor is backwards compatible. If you liked the way you used to do things circa 1.0, simply keep writing apps that way. Later versions just gave a few more options to people who wanted them. The magic didn’t go away; maybe it got obscured a little.
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With pm2-meteor deployment is really, really simple. Not as easy as it was with native meteor deployment, but it’s not complex
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I believe Meteor is still very popular, I don’t think you can say it’s not popular. I would say that is has lost some developer community support and you might be feeling that.
Meteor is still pretty popular.
But honest answer - a couple events have led to people being a bit worried about losing Meteor.
First, there was a bit of a fiasco when MDG announced they were going to switch to React. That was eventually changed to supporting Blaze/Angular/React, but even after they decided that, some of the damage was done and people were a bit worried about future changes.
Then last year a somewhat similar situation happened with Apollo. There was a lot of fear of Meteor getting abandoned. Also, one issue that had a lot of people worried (including myself) was backwards compatibility as Apollo gets integrated in to Meteor. This brought up a lot of potential issues, starting with having to do import statements, to atmosphere packages, and so on.
MDG has stated we don’t have to worry too much, and so far that has been true. But I do believe any users with a large Meteor project probably do have a bit of worry about this. Huge refactors are never welcome in most projects. But so far there’s been no major issues.
Prior to these 2 events, Meteor had a LOT of steam, and I seen a LOT of people talking about it positively.
I think once MDG is past the potential refactors, it will be a great time for them to step up advertising and bring Meteor back up. Because the main issue (both times) has always been users feeling “safe” working in Meteor. Feeling like they have not been forgotten, or abandoned, after supporting Meteor through the tough times.
It’s a hard balance to be simultaneously welcoming to new users, supportive of your current community, as well as developing the platform/framework with modern features that will keep Meteor appealing in to the future.
(Oh, one thing I forgot to mention, the update a little over a year ago, 1.3 I believe? It made the “new user tutorials” MUCH more complex than they were before. They were very well targeted at someone who is first using Meteor before. The new tutorial is more an example of “best practices”, and from having our new employees try it out, their opinion is it is very difficult to understand for someone new to Meteor. I had to personally train them Meteor, because Discover Meteor was out of date, and the new tutorials only confused them.
I think their worried about users getting the wrong idea about what Meteor is if they make it too basic. A lot of experienced node users would look past Meteor, I imagine because the “magic” seems like you have less control over your project. It’s not clear to them that they are using an insecure/autopublished version of what Meteor really is.
So before, the tutorial was great for new users, but turned off experienced Node users. Now the tutorial probably looks wonderful to experienced Node users, but looks complicated to new users.
I still think they should have multiple tutorials. One targeted at complete new users of Meteor, that shows the “magic” of Meteor. Other ones can be put in the Meteor Guide and show best practices. )
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Excellent assessment.
They’ve also been working through some super gnarly refactors, which has slowed things down. On the other hand, they’ve also been moving towards a development process that includes long-term support (LTS) of specific versions of the platform (i.e. v1.4.0 included Mongo Enterprise support and Node LTS support). As that LTS gets more formalized and gnarly refactors get accomplished, popularity will start ramping up with larger players.
Also, while the new import statements can be overwhelming for new developers, that’s a problem that can be addressed with proper tooling.
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This ‘magic’ never existed. For production Meteor deployments, all this and much more always had to be done. In fact Galaxy simplifies things a lot. The real magic in Meteor is still there.
Are you seriously saying this is hard? This is trivial stuff compared to manually building/deploying a node app on a server.
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I still think the classical Meteor stack is great for rapid prototyping. I couldn’t believe how much I got done in a week when I first started using it. I was elated. I think the biggest thing today is that there are so many moving parts in the JavaScript ecosystem – picking a framework-level solution (rather than a basket of libraries) is kind of betting the farm on one key piece of tech. And there are certainly no silver bullets.
No one could have predicted how the JS ecosystem would change since the Meteor 0.x days, but I don’t think we should be surprised by the developments. And I think MDG has been making great strides in a world where they ease deployment, while also owning less of your tech stack. It’s a different message than the early days, but I think from a business perspective, MDG has to have happy enterprise customers – and that flexibility is key.
In terms of its future, I see it being where it is today. They have a number of happy customers but it’s not the Apple or Google of app development. Meteor’s vision in the early days was something really cool and admirable.
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I think that like many technologies before it Meteor is going through the familiar phases of the hype cycle coupled by the complexity of an evolving ecosystem of Node.JS itself.
If there was a phase of Trough of Disillusionment and drop in adoptions and growing concerns it has to be the last year and half. Lots of changes to address the major pain points and the platform has been stretched to it’s limits by the early adopters.
However as of 1.4 and going forward I really think that Meteor and MDG is on the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ curve. Meteor has a unique value proposition in the Node.js ecosystem, it’s strength and weakness have been discussed many times so there should be no major surprises, if you use Meteor today every single issue you might hit has probably been discussed by someone on this form.
So I really think Meteor is in a great position today, it’s a unique platform, it’s stable, has a great guide, community and ecosystem, it’s well tested and aligned with the rest of the Node.JS community and it’s supported by a forward thinking organization.
Kudos to the MDG team and Meteor early adopters for sticking and pushing through the changes and rough times and let’s all enjoy the plateau of productivity 
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One of the nice things about Meteor’s MongoDB integration is that when you start your local instance for development, it also starts your MongoDB instance, makes sure you have a compatible version, etc… It’s a convenience I’m not sure how to duplicate with MySQL (or another database) when using apollo.
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Very true - I can’t argue with the super-easy convenience. That was one of the things which attracted me to Meteor in the first place.
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I’m new here and my first impression with building apps in Meteor is great. The only big downside is, that almost half of the packages I tried from Atmospherejs are outdated, All I get are errors. Feels like meteor is abandoned…?
Is it possible to use NPM packages insted of Atmospherejs?
NPM packages are just as bad. In fact, the signal-to-noise ratio might even be worse on NPM.
Meteor tried to keep a curated collection of packages, back in the days when they were pitching Meteor/Atmosphere as the .Net framework of Javascript. But at the end of the day, people demanded configuration and customization instead of consistency and reliability.
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Is it possible to use NPM packages insted of Atmospherejs?
Its MDG’s intention to move completely to NPM based packages. So use npm wherever you can. Just install them like this:
meteor npm install --save lodash
Then use it like this on top of the file:
import _ from 'lodash';
//Then use it
const obj = {a: {b: 1}};
const one = _.get(obj, 'a.b');
Thank you cloudspider, I will try it.
Yeah, this is a good point. I always see Meteor getting bashed on reddit. They never mention why they don’t like Meteor other than vague references to “issues”. Did MDG upload videos to YouTube of them running over baby kittens with the company Tesla? What did they do to poison the Meteor brand within the JS zeitgeist?
Interestingly i’ve been listening to an interview with DJ tiesto. It was a recap from the time he switched from to house. People nicely said were not amused. His reply was “i dont care. I love making good music for people that enjoy good music.”.
Its sort of similar with MDG. 
people just dont like change. It makes them feel uncomfortable. Whenever someone sees a platform that does most things for them out of the blue, they will oppose it, because it makes them have to change their mindset.
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Meteor is not more popular because of the pessimistic view of the community. I see too many negative posts and comments. For example, wondering “why meteor isn’t more popular”, is a doubt. A community has a lot to do with bringing on new developers. I no longer use meteor. I’ve moved on to use something else, and the community there is 100% optimistic. There are no expressed doubts. It’s nice to use a tech without having to constantly question your decision. I often doubted my choice of meteor (as do many on this forum). That is my opinion as to why meteor is not more popular.
I think part of innovating is stumbling upon resistance. Nothing wrong there. People generally live in a fog making them blind for innovative things. Especially quality software