I’m a senior lecturer teaching Meteor at the University. Some months ago, with MeteorPad and the easy “deploy” command, Meteor was a really good choice for beginners with some basis in Javascript. Today, MeteorPad is gone, Galaxy is a paid service and I can’t say MDG really cares a lot about documentation.
I decided to wait some month before considering switching to some other framework, but the revival of MeteorPad could really keep me in. In such a case, I would contribute for sure, but you should consider some (affordable) educational plans. You’ll maybe find inspiration looking at CodePen.
I put together a short Google form to collect some data on who can help, and how much they can help. If you’re interested in bringing back MeteorPad, please fill it out and share the link with other Meteor users.
Hey everyone, I’m sad to say I won’t be pursuing any of the options I outlined above in the near future. Only option C provides MeteorPad’s core value, a trivial way to share full stack meteor code with other people. While some people stepped up with generous offers, the time and monetary requirements to support option C are too much for me to bear at this point in time. I’m still open to bringing back the project if the situation changes and I can get more support on this project. Thanks for understanding.
I own an online marketing firm and I can confirm it would be trivially easy to monetize something like MeteorPad. You would be crazy to throw away such a lucrative asset.
how about using something like https://www.patreon.com/ for governance of this?
I would be willing to chip in, but like @batjko said, you need to do accountmgt on this. Nobody wants to do that, but if we can outsource it?..
I literally just read about this on Joel Spolsky’s blog, and my first thought after giving it a spin was “Nice… but I wish it could run Meteor.”
My second thought was “but, wait, wasn’t there something like this for Meteor? I remember using that a while ago… MeteorPad or something?”
Next, I was googling MeteorPad, only to find out that it had been taken down. And that led me to this discussion.
Yes, HyperDev is nice… but really, wouldn’t it be nicer if it could run Meteor? With HyperDev, I still have to build my own REST API, manually configure my middleware stack, database access (does that even work? Do I hook into a MLab instance?), and use jQuery for server interactions (or set up my entire frontend stack by hand).
Honestly, it feels like two steps backwards from MeteorPad.
There seems to be a pattern here – MDG paying to host a nice party for everyone… and then leaving them stranded without any warning.
Of course I understand that @mike had to pull the plug once MDG stopped paying the bills… But they really could have done a better job helping to figure out a smooth transition, rather than simply letting it go dark.
…and I don’t know what makes you think he should be allowed to do that. While it might be nice to get back those meteor examples, I don’t know that I or many others would want their privately made meteor sketches dumped for all to see. Not to mention the thousands of Example To-do apps you’d have to sift through since it created a new to-do every time anyone came to the site. AND 1.4 makes pretty much all of those sketches I saw/remember/worked on obsolete now.
This might have already been addressed in this thread, but it seems like this would be a great opportunity for MDG to provide another paid service. The C9 business model for dev workspaces is great and I think people would pay for this service on meteor pad. If you can’t get the code for it, I wonder how hard it would really be to re-implement?
Someone suggested a demo for a package I published, but doing a basic demo is not very useful for developers. Of course something as big as AutoForm has a great dev demo and tool. I was thinking of doing a quick “mini-meteorpad” for the demo. Would be interested in looking into how difficult it would be to build (client only?) re-implementation(?). I would be interested in looking into this, maybe with a couple of other people? Seems like this is such an important and missing tool for the community…
What about branching https://github.com/c9 and just tailoring it to meteor? Meteor runs great on c9 just not quite as quick and easy as meteorpad. Main issue will be hosting costs which is why would be awesome if Meteor did it as freemium service!
I have not used c9 so I’m not quite sure how it would work. Initially I thought, why not try to just run the Meteor client (with Blaze eg) with simulated server and without a real backend (client side collections). If there was an easy way to do it with c9 that would be great!
I haven’t really used docker but I think someone with docker know-how wouldn’t have a hard time at all! My main concerns would actually be that there might be an issue with mongodb licensing (which is why c9 took down it’s official meteor package), the hosting costs, and maybe the “auto-deployal” of c9 instances (not sure if they opened sourced that part).
I was actually thinking of something different. Rather than trying to run a full instance of the meteor app for a cilent side interaction, Meteor runs a simulation of the server in the client anyway. So really all one would need to do, is allow for dynamic and programatic definition of components and methods and you wouldn’t need to run a server for every client. So no Docker.