Question Meteor or Apollo

[almog]

I have a question for the current Meteor community It’s been a while since I used Meteor which is a bit sad as I was one of the very early adopters and even created a local user group.

I’m trying to understand the current state of Meteor as it has been sold off to a different company, for the most part, I would not use it but I need to developer a SAR application pretty fast using a web platform and mobile integration with a Flutter mobile app.

I was looking at Meteor or Apollo I know they’re different but trying to understand what are peoples thoughts

[cereal]

They’re different. Apollo is for writing and consuming graphql APIs.

Meteor is a framework for isomorphic web apps, where you can kind of re-use serverside code on the frontend.

You can write literally anything in either one. You could also use traditional REST APIs.

[coagmano]

@almog

I’m trying to understand the current state of Meteor as it has been sold off to a different company

Just on this part, selling Meteor to Tiny has helped to provide more focus on Meteor and Galaxy core features. The community’s gotten more energised to get involved and update important 3rd party packages too.

[almog]

Yes I know this but maybe I missed something with Apollo but I understand that with the Apollo client you get a framework not like Meteor but you can do the same thing.

[almog]

Thanks, I’m just wondering if this will last and why not use Apollo now as you can do the same thing with the Apollo client unless I missed something regarding the Apollo client

[vikr00001]

As you know, Meteor is a full-stack development framework. It has integrated accounts, a build tool that will build pretty anything you throw at it, and a Mongo integration that provides reactive data wherever you need it.

I would say that Apollo is pretty much just the interface from your app to your database, rather than a full-stack dev framework. It can replace the reactive-data-mongo part of Meteor, but the rest of Meteor is still very valuable and something like it is going to be necessary in your app. You’ll need a build tool, you’ll need accounts, and so on.

The benefits of Apollo vs. Meteor’s interface to Mongo, is that you can use any db – Mongo can be used but is not required. Apollo does great client-side data caching, optimistic UI, provides subscriptions for reactive data, etc.

If you’re doing a quick app, consider just using Meteor-mongo. There’s a bit of a learning curve on Apollo/GraphQL.

[dandv]

And to make things a little more confusing…

Meteor create --apollo

I have submitted a PR that will introduce a basic Apollo skeleton from Meteor 1.10.3 (if accepted): I wrote about my decisions here: I’m looking for additional feedback and maybe I can inspire others to create additional skeletons or at least we can have a discussions about possible variations of the Apollo skeleton as I suggested in my article.

Maybe @storyteller can jump in and explain how to use GraphQL in Meteor instead of DDP?

[storyteller]

There are multiple ways on how to use Apollo in Meteor. You can either completely replace DDP with Apollo over HTTP, or you can use Apollo over DDP which gives you things like GraphQL Subscriptions and other goodies. The PR I submitted is Apollo over HTTP with DDP available. Additional info here:

meteor create --apollo

[almog]

Thanks very helpfully