There’s a lot of talk about Blaze vs React these days, with some even suggesting that Meteor abandon Blaze for React. One argument is that since Blaze is only used inside Meteor, MDG has to spend a lot of extra resources on its development. Resources that might get freed up if we just used React.
So this got me thinking: if Blaze is here to stay, what can we do to push its adoption outside the Meteor ecosystem, and hopefully lighten MDG’s load? For example, what about giving Blaze its own site, branding, and documentation?
Leaving aside time and money issues, is that something MDG would be interested in doing? Or are there other ideas to push Blaze more and establish it as a valid competitor to React?
I think promoting blaze is an awesome idea that should be done but MDG doesn’t have the resources. Here are the steps as I see them, in order of importance:
Package blaze for many of the popular JavaScript package managers in a way that is easy to keep up to date with the official Meteor release (this probably also includes packaging Minimongo, Tracker, reactive-dict, reactive-var, etc.)
Create a standalone page that has some of the benefits of Blaze listed and has directions on how to use the standalone release specifically
A documentation page that is kept in sync with the official Meteor documentation (I think the official Blaze documentation could be improved as well)
From what I hear other people at MDG saying, we’d be pretty happy if someone particularly motivated in the community could help out with this.
What about this??
Has this topic been discussed before??
Why not use React?
I personally think Meteor will get huge amount of adoption and organic publicity if it uses React. Also, it is one less thing that developers have to learn and be proficient about.
@Sacha, thanks for starting this! I have read quite few posts here in forums and outside about using React with Meteor and about using React at all, and to be honest, I’m still not convinced that the world should go crazy about React, although many folks may disagree with this. Please correct/amend me, but so far I found that:
the key pros for using React:
Architecture and Components (interesting but a bit ugly): helps to have the look, the behavior, and get the data in the same file;
State management and passing data (between templates, i.e. components)
Server-side rendering;
the key pros for using Blaze:
Extremely easy to learn;
Does support components (in different ways) and perhaps promoting [as optional] the Sideburns-like way to build Meteor apps could help to promote Blaze.
Many packages rely on Blaze;
the key lacks of Blaze:
State management and passing data (between templates, i.e. components)?
Need more well-made components that would be easy to drop into a next Meteor project?
This may sound stupid but I’ve been using Meteor for a while now. I started using meteor last year October and until now I still don’t really get what exactly Blaze is. Or rather where does Blaze start and stop. When I’m using Templates, am I already using Blaze? I know Blaze is a component system similar to Angular, Polymer, React, etc. but I’m not even sure if or when I’m using it.
Am I using Blaze as soon as I’m using Meteor? Or do you specifically need to declare Blaze stuff to be using stuff (as it looks like from the docs).
Also, I’m wondering if Blaze and Polymer would be completely different things. For example, let’s say in a few months webcomponents are natively implemented in browsers, Polymer has been reduced to only the sugar coating for writing components with webcomponents. Would I have to switch out Polymer/Polymer webcomponents, or will it work together with Blaze?