Which Router are you using for a mixed Blaze and React app?

help
22

YMMD. That summarises it very well. Strange thing is that many hipsters left despite of that, since it was too easy to drop the rest of Meteor once a lot of tech was replaced by the latest and greatest anyways.

23

IKR! For real… let’s see.

“We have this awesome real-time front-end back-end magical tool!”
“Everyone is loving it!”
“Oh no, there is a new tool that FB made so it must be the One True Way now!”
“OMG the bloggers aren’t talking about us anymore they’re talking about the New Thing!”
“We better get that new thing working with our thing!”
“Oh yea for sure! I haven’t had a Twitter mention in 3 hours!! D: D:”
…6 months later
"Hey now we made a bunch of breaking changes and the shiny things kinda play together!"
“Yea this is awesome!”
“What about our shiny blaze thing”
“Whatever, everyone is blogging about this shiny turd pile now!”
…
“Hey… what happened? Everyone is gone?”
“I think they realized that with the new shiny thing they don’t actually need our shiny thing which we messed all up just for the other shiny thing but it seems to be shining so brightly that our thing now is just a thing no one cares about because the other thing does the magic and doesn’t even have a friggin’ backend to code!!! WAA WAAAAAAA”
…
“We better start a new database shiny thing like theirs then…”

24

“Hey, you wanna go to bar volleyball?”
“Nah, all the hipsters play Reactball now, don’t drink and say prayers to the original FB icon so I’m going over there tonight.”

25

I wished there was a roadmap for Blaze, but there is not

26

On the other hand, many of those abandoned Blaze packages were over ambitious (thus hard to maintain - there was burn out), and contained weird corner cases that were hard to work around (Iron Router, CFS, Simple Schema/Autoform, etc.). The interdependency and tight coupling between specific packages and versions has also been a problem. I think there’s a reason React’s more in-your-face positions on business and core logic, and cleaner (almost redefined) separation of concerns, makes a lot more sense for any project you may wish to scale. Vue.js is probably just as good, uses some similar higher level concepts, and is catching on (I haven’t used it yet, but given the React patent issue it’s on my radar).

27

CFS was a real mess, but I still love SimpleSchema. In most cases when I faced a supposed edge case, it was always my fault. The only thing I am missing is a way to replace the whole content of a document on an update. This just doesn’t work, you have to use $set.

I don’t dare to use VueJS yet, since its adoption isn’t as good as React’s. It was a pity that Meteor didn’t take the chance to make a tight integration with Vue when the creator was still on board.

28

There is some kind of roadmap:
http://blazejs.org/#Future-Work

29

ok but no time line maybe we have to wait for that to see what the future is of blaze, any way i like blaze

30

Mobile and Animation
Blaze will cater to the needs of the mobile web, including enhanced performance and patterns for touch and other mobile interaction.
We’ll also improve the ease with which developers can integrate animated transitions into their apps.

I give up .React all the way!

31

i would not go into panic about FB and react it is the same As Oracle with mysql, FB is not interesed in the one man shop

32

My main problem with SimpleSchema is just the transition to the new version - so many older packages are hard linked to the old version that upgrading is tricky (I created a dummy local package that uses the new npm based simpl-schema and exposes it as if it was the old on).

As far as updating whole documents - I have a trick for you!

updateTileInGrid (id, data) {
  check(id, String)
  check(data, Object)
  MySchema.validate(data)
  MyCollection.update({_id: id}, MySchema.clean(grid), {bypassCollection2: true})
}

There are of course some edge cases where it doesn’t validate certain nested props (within an array) and clean removes those same values. There is a bug, but its actually starting to look like SimpleSchema is abandoned.

(None of my criticisms of SimpleSchema or any other package are meant to disparage - these packages have saved me a ton of time, and I could not appreciate the work and dedication of the authors more than I do.)

1 Like
33

Thanks for the info. I guess you mean the Meteor package? The npm version seems to be maintained. But I didn’t know yet that aldeed has deprecated the Meteor version. Sad thing is that the new npm version has a lot of breaking changes. Man, I had so many breaking changes in packages already when upgrading my app from 1.2 to 1.5, I just can’t count them. Upgrading a Meteor app is really a nightmare.

34

that’s just it: it works. Replacing it not a priority; so why spend resources on frivolous activities when we could instead spend that time delighting our customers in ways they care about?

35

Actually IronRouter pre-dates Arunoda’s FlowRouter, but yes, community developed packages have long played an important role in the evolution of Meteor as a framework.

Meteor didn’t make their own router because the community created Iron Router, and later the community created FlowRouter, and now you can use react-router too. All of these solutions still work fine in production–we have two large commercial apps built with IronRouter and we have absolutely no issues with routing. We use react-router with our latest app, and we were to create a new app Blaze app (unlikely) we probably use FlowRouter.

Why should MDG waste resources creating a router then we already have three?

1 Like
36

And it still works fine! Believe it or not, this stuff just doesn’t need continually babysitting to do what it was designed to do.

2 Likes
38

And the good thing about open source software is that if a package breaks, you don’t have to submit a ticket and wait weeks for a fix, just fix it yourself! And the smaller the package is, the easier to find the bug.

1 Like
39

and often, if it’s used actively by a large enough group, someone else might beat you to it!

40

I’ve been doing this a lot recently with older autoform packages.

41

Hey,
For router part, I was not happy with Flowrouter, Ironrouter and react router.

So I was looking for something more declarative, more simple, and I saw https://github.com/kriasoft/universal-router

I’m not in production yet but this one is really simple to use (a delight)
See how I used it with server-render package here: https://github.com/antoninadert/proto-starter

43

I appreciate the offer, but I’m not sure you’d get along with our team.

Clearly you have no real understanding of why some people prefer React. Why don’t you just ask instead of imagining they must have no good reasons at all? Have you ever thought you could be offending a large number of devs by underestimating their intelligence like that?