React/Vue/Blaze?

blaze
1

I have currently been building my app using just Blaze, but for long term reasons I have been considering using Vue or React, mainly to increase my knowledge of one of these popular frameworks.

Is there any advantage to using one of these frameworks over just using Blaze? I havent seem to run into a situation where Blaze hasn’t been able to handle what I am trying to do but I also havent been using it for very long or done any large projects.

So I guess my question to you more experienced users is:

Should I use an additional framework like React/Vue?

And if so what advantages are there? Are there any examples that will help open my eyes? Because as far as I can see its simply preference.

2

There ‘was’ no difference. But things have changed and the number of benefits for React, Vue and Angular over Blaze are growing:

  • Hot Module Replacement allows you to have hot code pushes on component level.
  • New features like hooks, optimized virtual dom and a huge community vs a declining blaze community.
3

I would agree with this. We are still with Blaze because there is no reason to switch. It works well, has no bugs and allows fast development (not to mention all our components are already working well).

If we ever get to it, we’ll probably migrate to Vue which has the wind in its sail, and is easier to pick up and start developing than react (and faster) and is closest to Blaze – vue has almost same number of github stars while being much younger.

2 Likes
4

Reasons to stick to Blaze:

  • Stable, reliable (although not that fast / light)
  • Integrates very well with the Meteor Ecosystem
  • Separate HTML (view) from JS (View-Logic)
  • You already know a good bunch of it’s functionality (never use a new technology in a high stakes project)
  • No update-hell (switch a major react version and you know what I mean)

Reasons to switch to React/Vue

  • Large community (Bugfixes, features etc.)
  • Good job opportunities (especially React)
  • Performance, resource usage
  • If you know them you can also write frontends for non-meteor projects
  • Meteor support is good react, steadily improving for Vue
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5

Never thought “gets only critical patches” could be viewed as a positive aspect, but I hear you :rofl:

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6

Actually I also stated evaluating many tools in the node ecosystem in terms of their stability. In the React ecosystem the trend is to rewrite. React router got a re-write, so did material react and many other critical components.

For folks who try to deliver to clients stability and reliability are critical I think.

7

There’s certainly a price to pay for riding the wave of latest and greatest in JavaScript… that being said, Meteor has been the exact opposite while still innovating like crazy. I think it’s an amazing and underappreciated feat!

3 Likes
8

I’ve completed many Meteor/Blaze apps over the years (since 2015), and have mostly always had them running smoothly and reliably. Performance issues encountered typically involved publication/subscription/data “manipulation” issues rather than anything apparently Blaze-related.

I was looking forward to building my first project using Vue because of what I’ve read & seen, but after working on setting up my new app’s basic infrastructure for well over a week, I’ve become sorely disappointed. Vue integration with Meteor seems to have fallen behind. Vue 3 was released over a year ago (Sep 2020) but still no Meteor integration. Also, with node-sass now deprecated and removed from npm, it’s causing a cascade of issues trying to use existing style frameworks like Vuetify and Vue Material whose webpack-centric design also conflicts with Meteor’s build functionality. (Let alone the lack of support of indented CSS format.)

Though I really like how Vue structures its code, I feel like the integration with Meteor has eroded to where I no longer trust that it will remain a stable integration moving forward. If anyone has more Vue+Meteor experience, I’d like to hear your take is on where you think this is going. Also, anyone in the MDG care to provide insight into the Meteor+Vue roadmap?

1 Like