New Developer, should I bother with Meteor given all the negativity?

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I’m making the transition from web design into development and I initially decided that learning about node.js, mean stacks, js frameworks and now Meteor seemed like a solid plan. Now after reading all the negativity surrounding Meteor and their decision/lack of a decision on how to handle their view layer and/or moving away from being a full stack framework and just another thing to install with NPM, I’m feeling like I chose poorly.

Would I be better off committing to something like ruby/rails? Is there a future in learning Meteor? I can’t honestly say that I care for React. I think it’s overkill for 95% of the real world applications out there.

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Focus on learning development, not on other people’s negative opinions. One’s a JavaScript framework, the other’s a Ruby framework. I’d focus on learning JavaScript.

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If you’re just starting out, just going with something will teach you more than reading and agonizing about deciding which framework to go with. You can always switch out later if you are just learning things. Not like you are supporting a billion dollar enterprise (yet, haha).

I started out a few months ago with Meteor. It was my first steps into web development. I can say that I don’t regret it. It’s also made me a lot more comfortable with web dev in general, so transitioning to other things is a lot less intimidating than when I first started.

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I would say meteor is a THE best choice in the JS land right now as there’s a lot of tools available and very little consensus as each tool has its own pros and cons. So, here meteor had made the tooling decisions for you and no more JS fatigue, mostly. If you wanna build something small to medium size, its perfectly fine to go with the default stack using meteor guide as reference.

But for developers looking for more flexibility, meteor’s move towards npm opens up much more opportunities to integrate tools which are not supported by MDG and also helps bridge the island of ‘bliss’ which is meteor. This way we get the safety net of being protected from the massive shifts in JS community every few years, as MDG keeps their tools backward compatible and it seems to be a big priority for them.

Now, in terns of traditional stacks like ROR or django, meteor is much more future proof as most applications are moving towards reactive interfaces and trying to put together all the tools to do so in a ROR or express stack is a nightmare. Also, meteor is much easier to learn as you get a single workflow from the backend to fronted, and everything hooks up nicely, without hassle. (even if you use react)

PS: Given you are starting out with Meteor, just use blaze as the benefits of using React right now are marginal and also like @franky said: focus on learning JS as it would allow you to be a better at web and meteor development.

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I’ve never even for a second started to think that Meteor was a bad choice.

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You won’t be disappointed, it’s awesome. We’ve built two MVP’s on Meteor, and it has been a huge help all the way.

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I am one of the guys who were not really happy with MDG’s decision to deprecate Blaze and also clearly stated my concerns in this forum.

Yet, I still think Meteor is an awesome framework, I would never have come that far without it!

I was also coming from a UI / frontend background, and am absolutely amazed that I now can cover the whole stack with my app, without any help of a backend developer.

I was even able to do the cloud deployment to Amazon EC2 in 1/2 day (including myself learning how to setup an EC2 instance!), thanks to the awesome tools from @arunoda. After everything was set-up correctly, it was just a matter of one single command-line statement.

Tell me any other framework that can do this. It’s just wow.

And that’s just one example of the many situations where Meteor has put a smile on my face during the development process. Another wow effect was when I set-up an instant search in only 1 day - by using another package from Arunoda, did I mention how cool he is yet?

And now that MDG has revised the Blaze decision and committed to supporting both React and Blaze, I’m even happier, since I now know that I have a go-forward solution for the future (React), but don’t have to throw away my existing code (Blaze) too soon. That was great news and a big relief to me.

The only concerns I am having at this moment is that my Meteor app might not scale that well, as my app is targeting a broad C2C market. I read a lot recently about the bottlenecks of pub/sub, oplog tailing and the resulting server load. But it could very well be that I’m just not experienced enough in DevOps matters, so I’m trusting in the technical wisdom of MDG (and, again, betting on Arunoda’s packages like meteorcluster) that I will eventually find a solution to that problem, should it really occur.

Another good reason to use Meteor is the great and very active community here. Most of the times when I posted a question in the Meteor forum, I got an answer in 24h max. That’s just amazing and helps a lot. Though I can’t say the same for all of the package authors, most of them are also quite responsive, sometimes even within hours. This also shows the community devs really care about Meteor and are constantly improving their own contributions.

TL;DR: Give Meteor a chance, you won’t regret it!

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Meteor is like a free MS-ACCESS but can run on most devices. Easy to learn and good enough to quickly let you creates app. Then when your apps get complicated and you asked for more features, MS decides to discontinue MS-ACCESS in 6 months time and tells you to start using SQL and dotnet.
At least you know VB (Javascript) and macro (Blaze),. Right? :laughing:

Thats my 2 cents.

PS. Don’t take the analogy seriously though.

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No.

Yes.

Ok, use Angular or … maybe … Blaze.

Have you written an application? Have you written one with React? In that case, excuse me for not ‘caring’ about how much you care for React. :slight_smile:

To add a bit of substance to my extravagant last part, I’ve written an MVP in Angular 1, Blaze and now React. They work differently, but I haven’t found enough cause to favor any over the other.

It really sounds to me like you’ve read too much into the hype (or very underwhelming recent news about Blaze) and you should get your hands dirty with either http://guide.meteor.com/ or http://mean.io/ if you so fancy the grass on the other side.

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There’s nothing like Meteor out there in the wild. You will be incredibly productive. Will you learn new paradigms? I don’t think so, but that’s because Meteor is so straightforward to use that you won’t have to wrap your head around much. That’s a major win.

Negativity here is at it’s peak, you picked a bad time to join the forums unfortunately.

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