What is Meteor missing?

core
101

Sorry to be the party pooper here, but what Meteor really needs is a consistent strategy.

In the last years, there’s been so much growth and change, and not everything was managed well. Things like MeteorPad just disappearing overnight, taking a huge amount of code samples with it.

Same story with Velocity. First, announcing it as the official testing framework, then unceremoniously dumping it in favor of a half baked homemade implementation in Meteor 1.3.

Similarly, Iron Router was supposed to be the “official” standard, suddenly, now it’s FlowRouter, which is arguably worse.

Now, Blaze is being downgraded to a “community supported” project (in other words, “we don’t have money to spend on this”). Is Meteor just going to be another backend solution for building React/Angular apps? If so, what’s the point? If it’s just about those two frameworks, why would I even choose Meteor in the future?

MDG has worked so hard to build momentum for this project, and now that it finally has gained some traction, it feels like it’s just about to evaporate into a cloud of “me too” buzzwords. Which is sad, because there are some really cool things about it.

When I first started working with Meteor in 2014, it’s strengths were simplicity, (somewhat) consistency and ease of getting started.

With Meteor 1.3, it seems to be trying to appeal more to enterprises and React/Angular lemmings. Gone is the ease of use (using another view layer requires installing extra packages and a significant amount of setup). Gone is the simplicity, instead of just getting started, you now have to decide between Blaze, Angular, and React. Soon, we’ll have support for other DBs, and then there will be even more choices to make. Sure, some of you will say “but it’s backwards compatible, so you can still use it the ‘old way’.” — Sure, but that’s getting increasingly buried under all the new efforts to make it appeal to big enterprises.

Just my 2 cents.

3 Likes
102

ES6 modules has certainly made Meteor much more complicated, but it’s for the better in the long run. Though what’s missing now are things that would make it easier to work with ES6 modules. e.g. auto-import functionality. It would be great if there was an IDE that could allow you to easily import a required module (just right click on the unresolved variable), which is what Visual Studio has had for C# for years. Visual Studio even knows which imports are unnecessary that you can remove.

More generally, what’s missing from JavaScript / ECMAScript is a fix for imprecise decimal arithmetic. e.g. they need to make 0.1 + 0.2 equal exactly 0.3. The imprecise arithmetic makes programming for monetary / financial / e-commerce applications much more tedious and laborious. The problem was fixed in Java and .NET around a decade ago (with the BigDecimal and decimal data types). Is it ever going to be fixed in JavaScript / ECMAScript? It’s obvious that apps that do monetary calculations will continue to grow into the future. Instead a lot of time has been spent on trying to make code syntax a bit shorter, which is OK but (arguably) not as important. Maybe it’s just too difficult to make 0.1 + 0.2 equal exactly 0.3.

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103

I wish Meteor was just more stable and reliable.

For example I got an error similar to the one described here. This error causes that a clients website is not reachable for a lot of its customers anymore.

For me personally it is not much important that every new short term hyped frontend framework is supported and every ES7 feature will be available direclty.

I also think disccusion like here are very imortant. The fact this is discussed a thousand times could be a sign there is a need of a better (and maybe paid) support for the whole thing.

104

https://www.meteor.com/developer-support

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105

I think MDG built something that is AMAZING.

Then they second guessed themselves.

In the startup world, you are suppose to listen to customer feedback. I think MDG got a little caught up in the feedback from hipster programmers and just second guessed themselves. That or they were beginning to get short on financial runway, and needed to think more short-term… they couldn’t “wait it out” to see if the “old meteor” would catch on… not their fault. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

I’m also not saying the current meteor isn’t good. Just saying it’s a completely different business hypothesis.

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106

What I am missing, comming from a LAMP-environment, is a simple way of deploying. Whoa! Stay with me :slight_smile: I read a thousand read.me’s on this, I will get there, but really? When you are used to just syncing with a server, importing (if you want to!) as MySQL dump, and re-pointing Apache to a new dir, it is… maybe not complicated, but messy…
Let me try to explain: most Meteor hosting is not application hosting - as I understand it. You will need to add a database hoster as well. Huh. Ok - why? That cannot be faster then hosting in one data-center, can it? It makes the proces a) less clear and b) more expensive. (With even the expenses not clear.) Then there are a lot of companies that will not host your application, neither your database, put perform some kind of magic, apparently worth money, but what it is they are adding other than “one click deployment” after a few days of study what is really happening, I do not know.
There are plenty of script, utilities, deployment strategies out there. But choosing and understanding what it is you are choosing between can be really bewildering. I think it is a shame that even Galaxy is more complicated than should be needed: "Galaxy doesn’t provide a database layer, you will need to host one yourself or use a third party. " Why? The whole fun for me started when it was clear that meteor has a near-invisible data layer on the client. Until you want to deploy it, apparently, and then I need a whole separate company to host this? [The funny thing is - I have yet to find a good explanation for this - really!]

Well, as you understand by now, I am on the verge of publishing my app. And getting a bit frustrated by this muddy thing with 2873465 possibilities, and none quite as easy as: press here -> sign up -> sync app -> get rich.
I would forgo the last step as a requirement, but I would love the rest to be as simple as that. (oh, and AWS Amercia is out of the question for me, so there you are :slight_smile: )

Other than this, BTW, I love meteor :sunglasses:

107

@a.com,

Couldn’t agree more – we went from prototype to production-ready in a couple of months, and have paying enterprise customers using already.

As money flows in, we are considering helping finance the ‘old way’ as frankly, it really surpasses when it comes to speed, features and reliability.

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108

There’s a very good reason for it, it’s that MDG can do a much better job with Galaxy if we focus on the hosting part alone. There are companies that offer just database hosting, and they do it better than we could.

Since the database providers we recommend are in the same AWS regions as Galaxy is, the latency is negligible.

Galaxy doesn’t offer database hosting (yet) for the same reason that your doctor doesn’t fix your cavities. You go to the dentist for that.

That said, Galaxy may add MongoDB hosting in the future, when and if it makes sense.

5 Likes
109

Meteor should have an integrated router (FlowRouter should be integrated imo).

I believe it also needs to regain it’s “user friendliness”. 1.3 got more complex, tutorials got more complex, and there’s less time spent developing & more time on markup/imports/etc.

I believe it would be very easy to regain Meteor’s user friendliness. Just need some better tutorials, and tighter integration for imports/load orders/etc.

So much time lately is spent on shiny new features & linking us together with the JavaScript world. But I would love it if Meteor “invited JavaScript to experience the Meteor world”. If that makes sense…

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110

I have to agree here. You still see people starting projects with iron router, which means they look at IR docs/tuts, have subscriptions at the router level, etc…

111

Well, you can always get the “old way” back by putting your code in the client and server directories instead of imports, and everything will be auto-imported for you (with the usual caveats about load ordering).

I generally think that’s an improvement to support both, and allow people to use it both ways (and combining them too!).

FWIW Rails also auto-imports everything (except the lib folder), and it hasn’t hurt it’s popularity in the slightest. Also, in years of working with Rails, I’ve never had an issue with load order – but then again, Rails is much more opinionated about its directory structure than Meteor.

What bugs me is perhaps that it feels like with Meteor 1.3, the “old way” may still be supported but it feels deprecated, since the guides and tutorial recommend using the “new way”. That might scare off a lot of new people who previously would have chosen Meteor for it’s ease of use especially when getting started.

That’s a JavaScript issue. Not something that Meteor can or should fix. It’s an old and well-documented issue, and there are solutions available. In Meteor specifically, you can use the 3stack:bignumber package.

1 Like
112

QFT. This x100.

Having a coherent strategy around autoimport is a must. The ES6 modules are fantastic and powerful and a gold-standard feature. However, we’ve traded the occasional intractable load-ordering errors for semi-ubiquitous cannot-find-module errors.

Also, moving a file from one directory to another has suddenly a complicated process. We also need refactoring tools, similar to VisualStudio, so when we move a file, all of it’s import references get updated. Don’t need drag-and-drop functionality. Right-click > move would be sufficient.

And +1 for getting something that improves decimal arithmetic. And TypeScript. How can we help get TypeScript and better arithmetic into core?

Agreed. :confused:

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113
  • React Native
  • Code Splitting (even if broad based - I don’t want to send all my admin templates to the client side end user).
  • ES 7 async/await on client and server, obscuring the older ways to do it (because that seems to be a huge tripping point for people trying to write server code, and it’s a place where code doesn’t run/can’t be written exactly the same on the server and the client)
  • Apollo integration!
1 Like
114

I do t hink its nice how you can do either way.

But I am in agreement that it “feels” deprecated.

Furthermore, they said this is just a ‘backwards compatibility’ feature and it will probably be removed. That would be very disappointing to me.

That is a big part of what I mean about Meteor’s user friendliness.

TBH, aside from some things with deploying not being as smooth as possible, I am overall very happy with Meteor. There’s not many features past what is on the roadmap that I would really care about being added. (although I do agree with @tab00 , as my stock management project does have a lot of decimal calculations and it does get annoying). I am fine with NoSQL so I’m not so excited about that (although I know many users are).

What matters to me? How convenient Meteor is to use, how fast Meteor is to work with, and how much time Meteor can save for a fully functional web application that has support for real-time features.

Those are the things that made me a Meteor user. I also believe that’s Meteor’s biggest strength. So I hope that part of Meteor will be focused on again in the future!

1 Like
115

meteor missing a deploy easy system. i have a project finished and i can’t deploy easy, i can’t use google compute engine with grapicsMagick,

a good idea google cloud launcher with grapicsmagick!!!.

another good idea. integration blaze + Macaw scarlet!!! front and back all in one WISIWYG, fast, complex and powerfull (the meteor philosophy)

116

Funny how the Javascript (not Meteor) issue with decimals comes up again… The simple solution is not to use decimals/floats for monetary calculations, like discussed before on this forum:

And of course what @pandawhisperer sad:

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117

Because it’s too hard.
Better to let you struggle with it yourself :wink:

118

Fast build tool. Professional adoption at scale.

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119

It comes up again because the problem hasn’t been fixed. There are workarounds that I use but I have to write extra code to use them (including replacements for $inc and $sum in MongoDB).

That is not an acceptable fix-all solution as has already been discussed elsewhere in the forum.

It is not Meteor’s fault but I think @benjamn is part of the Ecma Technical Committee 39, so maybe he could think up a proper fix once-and-for-all for a future ES version.

120

If you are using ESlint (highly recommended), you might be interested in this plugin: GitHub - kriszyp/eslint-plugin-auto-import: ESLint plugin for automatically importing modules

Of course it would be better to have it build into Meteor itself without any setup.

1 Like