I am a newbie programmer and I started using meteor about a year ago.
I am currently building an app for a friend that uses Iron Router and blaze.
Learning meteor with these two packages has enabled me to get started very easily and to build bigger and better apps.
The way you use the two has been easy to pick up and to use.
What concerns me is that I don’t think the new direction will be as easy for new developers as it was with Iron Router and blaze.
I send anyone who asks me how to start programming web sites to go to codecademy.com and do the javascript css and html courses and once they are done to come over to meter so that they can create things quicker with the toolset provided.
Has MDG considered that they might move away from being an easy platform to learn on and to then build out not only your skill but your app, while still learning your trade?
I have struggled to get my head around flow router and react, I have tried it and always I go back.
FlowRouter has a good documentation and as easy to use… I didn’t have any problems to change from iron router to flow router. For react you have to learn some new stuff, but I think there is no huge difference to learning angular or even blaze.
We started developing apps using Iron Router and blaze. But before couple of months - we have to switch to flow router and react. It takes some times to get used to these 2 new items, but it’s worth to spend this time. In Meteor 1.3 - we have to use these.
Thanks for responding. I am a lone “dev” and so easy things to use are going to help me much more.
I understand that there is a migration path for people who use Blaze right now and can spend time learning the new way to do things.
I just remember how easy it was to get stuff going with just my HTML CSS and JS skills learnt on codecademy.
When I see a statement that says you have to use react and then you go to the react site and see how complicated it looks, you kind of scare new dev’s
I hope that it stays that easy for people in the future.
Thanks I suppose that it will have to be learnt. I am just wondering how this will affect new users with the requirement to learn react to be able to use Meteor.
This might be a blocker for new developers. Unless MDG are not aiming at new dev’s but more experienced ones.
Im a complete beginner. I catch on quickly by reading and undetstanding the error messages. I love error messages.
The react docs are straight forward but the new ES6+ is driving me nuts. I’ve subscribed to egghead.io for tutorials because I understand faster by watching. Reading is OK as I still go back to my Discover Meteor Book and manage to convert it into react.
React definitely has a steeper learning curve than Blaze, but it’s not that hard.
And while porting an app to React I’ve realized that Meteor apps tend to mostly always use the same ~50% of React features, which makes using React even easier.
I use discover meteor quite a bit to get ideas on how to do stuff when I am stuck.
I can’t dedicate full days to my learning experience as I have to do my day job as well, so most of my dev work happens after my kids are asleep for 2 hours a night.
I was just getting worried that all my skill that I have worked quite hard to build up will be lost as I try to find another platform that allows me to express my ideas easily and quickly
it just seems Meteor is moving to the realm of, you need to be an intermediate dev before using it.
and that would be sad as I have inspired a few people to use it due to the rapid development you can do.
I suppose my own lack of skill creates this uncertainty with regards to my ability to keep using meteor.
I thought it was clear that Blaze will continue to be supported, at least for the time being. Sure, some time in the future, support may be lifted, but who knows, maybe there will be a fork or perhaps it will be taken over by the community. I will continue using Blaze for smaller projects since it’s so convenient.
Don’t worry! With the speed of which the JS vessel moves, React will be outdated before the community has reached consensus. By then there will be a newer, brighter and shinier star on the horizon
For ‘Solo’ programmers is a must write ‘clean code’ cause you are the only one that audit your code. ‘Clean code’ is code understandable then ‘maintainable’.
Newbie programmers, me include, think they need more easy to learn libraries or frameworks that doit they work quickly. But at first obstacle we stuck too much time figure out what is happend. Blaze is more easy to learn but React is more easy to grow in a abstract way, then more easy to ‘maintain’. And this is cause Blaze is a templating library and React is just JS increasingly FP.
We need methodologies that help us to be more abstract cause we cannot “understand” every single line of code that we wrote in the past. We must learn write clean modules and functions on the past and abstract us from it on present.
React is not that hard. I learned it right and quickly with ‘Stoyan Stefanov’ book. To me?. The best book, but still on Early Release.
@bysabi
Thanks for the tip on the book. Unfortunately it is to expensive for me to purchase right now.
Perhaps later on.
I agree that we need to understand our coe better as newbies but I think that comes from repeatable practicing.
if the parts you use change every time you start a project it is harder to enforce your memory with the working knowledge.
I don´t have the problem ‘Blaze vs React’ cause I use both.
Like I say above, React is JS and that´s why I try built my projects with but it lack some ‘irreplaceable’ packages like AutoForm and meteor-tabular, then I use Blaze too.
Meteor is far from be the ideal environmnet, it lack some state of art things and …
but is the best for ‘Solo’ developers out there and we must admit the good and the bad.
For you newbie programmers: I’m working on a Meteor 1.3 + React boilerplate. It will actually have a couple different features:
Serve as a straight-up boilerplate to scaffold a new project with a bunch of handy stuff included.
Also provide itself as a learning resource via a built-in working example.
So you’ll basically clone the repo and run npm install to update stuff and scaffold your project. But with regards to #2, you can type npm run example and it will switch to the example branch which has a fully featured app, riddled with comments for learning purposes. Hopefully the example app (and boilerplate) will answer a handful of questions, such as:
How the heck do I structure my app in a way that makes sense?
I don’t understand React!
How do I teach my cat how to code?
The boilerplate will evolve as Meteor changes and updates, but its focus will always be on a balance between keeping up to date and remaining stable/reliable (i.e. no super cutting edge stuff), and keeping the code clean and simple. No spaghetti code, no variables that take you 20 minutes to trace where they’re coming from.
Hopefully this will help make it easier for some people get on board with Meteor 1.3 and React. I’ll post in the “announce” category once it’s out there.
