Meteor Tooling is the cure for JavaScript Fatigue

I just wanted to drop a quick note and say that the Meteor build process is the perfect cure for javascript fatigue.

Dont believe me?

This is what the software industry thinks you have to deal with to get a good job.

This is why I leverage the Meteor tool. I don’t have to worry about Babel, Minifying my files, React integrations and soon with Apollo I wont need to worry about Relay Containers and GraphQL directly.

I guess all in all, I appreciate these things and wanna thank MDG for a great job on that thus far. I’ve never felt JavaScript fatigue when leveraging the build tool!

Now all the learning of these tools, thats a different store :slight_smile:

So thanks @benjamn, @sashko and pour one out for the homies that are gone.

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yep, it is definitely a huge benefit of meteor.

There’s nothing more frustrating than spending a huge amount of time setting up tools just so that you can get to creating. Really nice that meteor comes with it out of the box.

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I agree that Meteor build system is nice because it’s enough for most of devs and you don’t need to configure anything, but it could be much more elastic and documented imho.

Some pain points for me:

  • how will you add Stylus plugins ( http://stylus-lang.com/docs/js.html#usefn ) or Less plugins ( http://lesscss.org/usage/#plugins ) using core Stylus or Less build package ? You can’t, you need to build your own build package and hardcode those,
  • or how will you use PostCSS with its plugins or CSS Modules? You can’t, there are hacky community packages, that’s it.
  • stylus in official package is forked (as far as I know) so we are able to use newest one in our custom build packages, but it will not work well, for example imports from meteor package. I wrote about it here
  • also now we have Npm support, why we need separated build packages for Stylus, Less, or NodeSass etc?

I would love to help to improve that, but as for me all that build stuff in Meteor needs many time to understand it :confused: I love how it is done in Webpack. I can plug in loaders and each loader has its own configuration possibilities.

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Those are great pain points! And I agree with you it takes awhile to get into the build plugin way of doing things. But I think the peeps at MDG have bigger plans for it! And I think we can improve this! Just have to get into the depths of meteor internals.

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Just to follow up on what @abhiaiyer originally posted:

For every dev who complains that the deployment is too difficult, that the docs/example apps aren’t up to snuff, etc., there is a dev who truly appreciates the ease of building something with Meteor.

Perhaps we don’t post our appreciation enough, but hopefully you guys/gals know we are grateful!

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Meteor FTW! :smile: (complete 20 chars min)

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Yes, @abhiaiyer is right!

Let’s:

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I think @juliancwirko’s remarks are very valid, and the fact that MDG is addressing them means they agree. It’s more reasonable to expect Meteor’s npm support to support some of the most popular npm packages in use than to expect devs who need these features to master the build system.

Having said that, as someone who has spent some intimate time with the build system, it’s definitely worth getting to know :slight_smile: And I encourage those with relevant experience and/or motivation to get to know it and contribute cool things. I think the documentation for simple build plugins is definitely sufficient, with core packages as examples… the issue I believe julian is pointing out is the limitations of what build plugins can do cleanly, in a non-hacky way, without more support / API from the builder tool.

@juliancwirko, btw, I haven’t tried it, but did you see https://github.com/istarkov/babel-plugin-webpack-loaders? It let’s you use webpack loaders with babel, which you can get currently now with my community package with official support planned soon.

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Yeah, I use it when testing React components with CSS Modules :wink: I’ve tried it with Meteor too when I experimented with CSS Modules but I saw that the .babelrc is not supported and I gave up :wink: Anyway with your package it could open new possibilities. I need to find some time to play with it.

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Meteor is an unfair advantage. It’s like turning up to a fist fight with a rocket launcher.

I’ve been using it for a couple of projects at home, which has been great. But when I do my day job and have to use our full pipeline of different languages, build tools etc I realise just how much more productive I am with Meteor. FTW!

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Meteor is the future.