Where's the vision gone? Where ist the soul gone?

Planet Earth
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First i appologize for my bad english. It’s really not my strongest thing, writing it.

As i am a native Swiss german speaking CEO of a not IT-Company, that builds an internal system with the help of meteor.

I am sorry to say that. I am very disapointed. And i think , i am not alone.
I cannot say, how thankful i was, when meteor was coming out. For me it was something like a missing link in development.

It seems, that meteor has given up somehow under the pressure of money and some parts of the hardcore developer community and now is going away from being a really fantastic and easy to use tool to make people and companies less dependent on the good will some people.

In my eyes it lost it’s easy to understand way of doing things.

Let me also say, that i really don’t like react or angular 2. And for me Meteor lost it’s face a lot.

I cannot understand, how it came from a really great and fantastic experience to that, what it is now.

Instead of easy implementing other databases or building easy to understand layers, that handle data between server and client and improve minimongo and similar parts of the application, It try’s now to be everybody’s baby in the development industry and lost it’s focus on the way to easy to use and do things.

As a CEO it was helping me a lot, controlling my development team, because i could understand and even do things myself. And more important. I could make my ideas come true.

So i like to ask, if that is the end of a great idea, that goes under in the big river of once upon a time good ideas on to agreement of conformity. Or if there is still a spark of the initial idea, that could have been a real gamechanger in the world of development?

There are great people out there with great ideas for applications, that are not programmers in the first place. Meteor was a great chance for this people to build in a realistic time, what they meant.

In my eyes, Meteor lost it’s path. And all i can do, is hoping, that they find back to it.

I can only hope so.

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@lukasgrueter you are not a developer and that says a lot. Do you expect a developer to know and easily understand the business decisions as a CEO ?

As a CEO it was helping me a lot, controlling my development team, because i could understand and even do things myself. And more important. I could make my ideas come true.

I still don’t understand what stops your from doing that at this stage. What are the exact problems you are facing ?

Let me also say, that i really don’t like react or angular 2. And for me Meteor lost it’s face a lot.

In programming we do not make decisions based on emotions, what we like/dislike, it is based on solid arguments, and in my opinion React wins over Blaze by miles. However Blaze is solid, battle-tested and works perfectly as well. No one should stop you/your company from using it.

There are great people out there with great ideas for applications, that are not programmers in the first place. Meteor was a great chance for this people to build in a realistic time, what they meant.

Again, what is stopping them to do that now ? Meteor was very careful about backwards compatibility and they deserve respect for that, Meteor is continously evolving.

In my eyes, Meteor lost it’s path. And all i can do, is hoping, that they find back to it.

Bullshit, what you can do is: be objective what would you like Meteor to focus on, state exactly the problems you are facing. And because you are a CEO you can delegate some of the developers’ time into helping Meteor to solve some of their issues. It’s an open-source code, you do not pay for it, but you have the option to pay by contributing.

I think MDG’s decision to shift to Apollo was very inspired. It created a bit of friction in the community, agree, but they had to. But no worries, they left us with a solid foundation we can build upon.

Apologies for being a bit aggressive but this is just ranting, be more specific, and I’ll be friendlier :smiley:

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Thank you for your answer.

Let me say first, that i don’t care, if you are friendly to me or not. Fortunately i think, i am a free human being and therefore i allow myself to say, what i think. And so do you.

Having said this, i still stay to my words. I think, the initial vision was to make things easier and open better ways. I can understand, that some developers going long ways with schools and courses. And so they may not be interested in too easy solutions.

But i think, there are two kinds of needs in the future. And as there is a need, there will be a solution. One is an easy way to build applications to the need of the companies and persons and the other is the deeper industrial needs, which will always be much more complicated and is another thing.

Meteor made it easy to build apps for the daily needs. And that was fantastic. I was able to understand it and with a few hundred hours of schooling i was able to achieve a lot.

You have a developer standpoint of view. But that is not the only view, that matters today in my eyes.

So i t still think, based on some interviews with the MDG CEO, that i have seen, that he understands this needs. But, like i said before, i think it lost it’s path.

And as a side note. The emotional part of the work is as important as the facts and figures. And your emotional reaction proofs this in my eyes.

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Right now they are working mostly on Apollo, which is a new, ‘scalable’ data layer, usable with Meteor.

They haven’t done the ‘make it easy’ part yet (afaik) in favor of the low-level API which assumedly allows more flexibility (something Meteor lacked in places)

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Meteor made it easy to build apps for the daily needs. And that was fantastic. I was able to understand it and with a few hundrethours of schooling i was able to achieve a lot.

Meteor is still doing that and making good progress, I mean in the past 2 months we got 1.4.2 which improved the speed 5x times. + Many other goodies :slight_smile:
Meteor makes it harder now ? If yes how ? Can you give concrete examples.

You have a developer standpoint of view. But that is not the only view, that matters today in my eyes.

I am CEO as well of my company, but at my heart I’m a developer, it is my true passion. And frankly, what happened to Meteor in the past year was the best thing it could happen.

So, be more descriptive, here are some helping questions:

  • What parts exactly of Meteor right now make it hard to use, and previously they were easy to use ?
  • What exactly would you change in your vision to make it go on the same path ?

As mentioned, Meteor is open-source and you get it for free. Wouldn’t you like to repay their effort by contributing financially or with developer power to go back on their vision ? :slight_smile: Complaining on a blog-post without stating exact needs and problems does the opposite of helping. I personally can’t understand anything that you say, because you aren’t saying anything except: “I think Meteor is doing bad things and lost it’s path”

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I see that and i also hope, that apollo will be a success and become as easy, as meteor was.

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@diaconutheodor

Again. I do not think, that it’s up to you to judge, if and how i can complain or not. Decide that for yourself and not for me. You can complain based on what you think and i do it based on what i think.

But to get to the point:

Yes i would pay for that.

And i also find Galaxy a great idea. The reason, i am not yet uisng it, is, the way, meteor takes at the moment. And that is not as easy as before to deploy apps.

If they open for other frameworks, They should not only do so for react and angular. There is also polymer and vue, riot, aurelia and many more. If the goal is, to be more open, why prefer this 2 solutions?

Why sacrifice a lot of the magic, it was doing before and why sacrifce blaze.

Why coming from meteor create and going on easy to deinstall this, install that, and if you use react, you cannot use blaze and so on.

I can understand, that it is a good idea to be able to use native es6, but is that really the way, meteor should take? Do, what most others do? And so finally become some kind a me too thing.

And why not make it simpler instead of more complicated. Even simpler as in the beginning. Why not more “magic” instead of less and let the developer choose, how much control he wants. Why sacrificing a lot of the benefits that where so unique to meteor?

From my standpoint meteor was a hybrid between something like outsystems and let’s say rails or so.

And i am not really sure, what it is now. And ther is feathers.js and more.

I fell in love with meteor and now i am in doubts. Meteor made really easy and in my eyes it should make it even easier in the future…

And i can understand, if other people do not see it that way. but i do.

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I am not a CEO not even a full time developer. I am a Sr Equipment Engineer who do some programming to automate certain manual processed in production… Meteor is my first venture in web development as it saved me time in doing support compared to desktop application.

Now, a lot has been changed in Meteor… I’m saddened also of how things are going in Meteor… However one thing stands … WHAT IS THE PROBLEM AM I FACING THAT METEOR CANNOT SOLVE? and the answer meteor still solve everything so why leave…

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Good discussion. I’ll throw in my 2 cents.

When I found Meteor they had a Vision/Mission on their homepage that I cannot find anymore, but the gist was about making development simpler.

I think they should hold on to that vision and not just do what all the other cool JS tool-smiths on Facebook and Google are doing. It’s a niche, and it’s good to have that when you are small and on the same turf as giants. The universal JS, end-to-end stack concept is also a good niche to stick to.

But I think these niches are under constant threat from two parties - The investors who want MDG to do what everyone else are doing thinking that it will increase the return and success of Galaxy. And the big customers and their developers and the developers at MDG, who don’t see the problems smaller less experienced developers have when developing apps. Instead they optimize performance and large scale app dev, like all the other players.

I think MDG should stick to their guns and their niches because it’s what will give the most payoff long term. MDG is a goose roosting a golden egg and I hope the investors don’t kill and eat that goose before the egg is finished.

But there are sadly signs of that - The sudden scrapping of free Galaxy hosting was an awful decision that could have been made so much better. Make the apps run a bit slow and kill them off after a certain time limit for example. And perhaps put some ads in the apps. That would have sold commercial Galaxy much more than simply killing it.

Anyway, Meteor is still the best JS platform. Keep up the great work MDG!

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This were my first thoughts as I read that Blaze will be removed from the core and imports/npm will be the new way. Just 1 month later I’ve moved over to React and well, the new “way” makes some things better. I have to agree that we now have more boilerplate code, but that’s the price for better structured code. We are now knowing where our variables are coming from and don’t need to trust on the loading order thing. With React we are also able to use a big maintained eco system, so we don’t need to wait for any special Meteor packages or releases. That’s a big plus.

I’m having the same feeling that MDG lost a little bit the vision of Meteor. If you take a look on the homepage, the reactivity/data sync demo with the 3 devices is lost (@thea that was something I just want to ask you - why did MDG removed the whole reactivity part? Will Meteor loose this? I’m just wondering, because according to @sashko Apollo will have it also in a future release).

My recommendation to you (as a German based in Switzerland :joy:): Move over to React. You’ll get a better view into the Javascript eco system and you are able to use more packages. If you do this you’ll see, that the only thing you really need is the Meteor build tool + Pub/Sub for data sync. All other things, especially the view layer, are available via other well maintained packages (React, Vue, Angular).

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First of all: Thank you guys for this constructive approach to the topic.

We have a common base together, as we have the feeling, that meteor has somehow lost it’s path. Or at least it seems that it lost parts of it.

@patrix You got absolutely right in my eyes to say thanks to MDG! They did a great job.
I only want to insist… Please don’t get lost in the money only world like so many others!

It would really be great, if MDG could somehow find back to their roots and refind the confidence, that waht they do, is great. Even whend the money is not coming in the first place.

But there are many stories out there like apple, zappos and many more, that show. If you keep your vision, you could get maybe later, but much bigger.

But sometimes it needs a little patience.

@xta
I have my troubles with react. Maybe it’s subjective. But i prefer vuejs. But do miss some documentation. on how meteor and vuejs play’s together.

I know, that from a community and documentation perspective it really would be a good idea to use react or angular. But i must also have some kind of affinity to something, which i do not have to react for some reason. Maybe only, because i felt forced somehow in that direction from MDG. I do not like to feel so.

I really do hope on MDG, that they somehow get back on track. For the moment i got only left to consider some alternatives for database or frontend.

But to be honest. I do not really want to. Because i am still in love with meteor and it’s origin ideas.

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When will these threads ever end? Absolutely worthless.

MDG chose the modular path instead of continuing the holistic path. Had they continued the end to end, people would be bitching that “React is better than Blaze, why can’t we use that?! MDG has lost their way. Oh my god, another NPM Atmosphere wrapper. Why can’t we just use NPM!?”

The modular approach is the right strategy. They’re tradeoffs… ease of development vs tooling / chaining / packaging overhead.

For instance, many Meteor developers love their build tool. > meteor Done. Do you know what I love? Hot module reloading. For me, going back to Meteor’s build tool is akin to riding the bus after buying my first car – sure the bus is easier than the car, but are you kidding me?

Assembling your own stack is work, but for most developers, very worth it in the end.

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Funny :slight_smile: Really funny. Worthless and zero helpful, but very funny :slight_smile:

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This thread wasn’t helpful to begin with.

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Have you checked out the work from Akryum meteor-vue-component? I am still on Blaze but am considering Vue

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I’m still on Blaze for now. I’m not convinced React is a good option either. I feel strongly about keeping a separation of concerns - and mixing JS with template/view code feels wrong.

Apart from the obvious ineffectiveness of these threads, I support people voicing their concerns. A constant reminder of the community discontent is important.

Finally, I support the direction MDG are going with NPM modules and Apollo- I just wish they would support meteor deployment on other platforms beyond Galaxy. Galaxy is approximately 4 times the cost of my current deployment.

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I’m currently fixing up an app I build with Blaze last year, and it still works great. I also have some others built on React (and one with Redux), and those are great. I’m excited to build something with Apollo, it’s great! Everything is great. :slight_smile:

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I made an app with polymer and meteor. I ran in a lot of troubles with reactivity and more, that was costing me alot of time and research. And that in the end was costing me a good part of the time, that meteor is saving over all. That’s another reason, why i am concerned about the way it goes.

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On the other hand, some expressions of content could be in order. The discontents seem to be much more vocal in general, which could skew perception. There’s no reason anyone can’t use Blaze today, and continue to use it in the future as far as I can tell. There are certain types of projects that I would choose to use Blaze for, and others that I would choose to use React for.

Also, I prefer the way the React system separates concerns into components (now we just need a next level up module separation, which is where bundled CSS would live). To me, JS/CSS/HTML are different technologies/languages, but they are not separate concerns, and I can’t often realistically separate them - I just end up addressing single concerns in 3 different places. But it’s just preference. Whatever gets the job done gets it done.

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I totally get what you mean man!

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