Agreed, but the fact that Meteor now supports Angular kinda blurs the lines a little. No matter what DB storage engine you chose you’re locked in. With Meteor you’re pretty much locked to Mongo and probably compose.io, Firebase is no different in this context. If I were using Angular, I probably wouldn’t use Meteor as Firebase happily takes care of scaling concerns. I’d just spin up some microservices to process serverside code from a Firebase queue.
@niallobrien What do you mean by locked in? MongoDB and Meteor are open source, while Firebase is closed source.
I think he means locked in in the sense that if you write your application in Meteor and if you later want to move away from Meteor, you basically have to do an entire rewrite.
In both cases you’re locked in, but at least in the case of Meteor you are in control. If firebase suddenly stops its services, you’re pretty much screwed.
One reason why businesses are not using Meteor is the lock into Meteor. If I was running Meteor I would offer a premium paid for service which takes a Meteor application and converts it to a standard client and Node server app which a business could then adapt as required.
Meteor builds to a standard node server app and browser app…
Businesses are happy to have a lock-in in .Net and other technologies, so why would Meteor be any different as long as there is commercial support available (which is now the case). Also, there’s no such thing as a standard node server app. Especially in javascript, you’re always relying on a large amount of different libraries. I’d rather not rely on 200 small libraries maintained by random people in their spare-time on github, but on 1 big one, maintained by a company.
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Yes, there are varying degrees of lock-in. For example, do you have an iPhone, Android or Windows phone? They all try to lock you into their ecosystem. It’s just a matter of which pill you can swallow. If Firebase shutdown, I’m sure you can export your data. Being able to look under the hood on MongoDB at the source doesn’t mean a whole lot to me as it’s something I’ll never do.
I was working on Firebase projects before transitioning to Meteor. The biggest disadvantage of using Firebase (for me) is that you cannot write server side code, which makes you rely on third party services or make your server.
For example, try making a simple app that let’s you upload images. You will probably end up using services like Filepicker or Zapier. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re building a simple app or a prototype, you can build it on Firebase and get SSL connection with minimal setup. It just all depends on your requirements.
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Because Firebase is owned by google and will be shutdown/integrated into GCE in ~6 months.
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[quote=“seba, post:20, topic:11002, full:true”] I’d rather not rely on 200 small libraries maintained by random people in their spare-time on github, but on 1 big one, maintained by a company.
[/quote]
I agree but behind the screen Meteor is full of small libraries - have a look at packages in Chrome debug window, in my app I have over 60 such libraries.
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Yeah, but they are all designed to work together and made by the same people. Of course, you also have external modules, but at least the core is.
These are the answers for the topic 
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Simple answer: To have other options that might suite someones needs.
…meanwhile somewhere on angular/firebase forum
new topic
Why do we need angular+firebase when we have Meteor?
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Lot’s of great answers here so I will just add two more point -
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You can use them both in the same app!
angular-meteor integrates with any Angular library including angularFire.
So in case you have a simple angularFire app and you start getting more complex features that needs real server code, you can write your server code in Meteor while leaving the simple data on Firebase using the same front end app. - I think that the angularFire solution pushes you to write less well architected code.
It encourage you to write lots of code that belongs on the server, on your client side.
With Meteor writing that code is as simple as writing it on your client side, but that code sits where it truly belongs.
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Yes, you’ll need to write some server-side code. That situation still stands with Meteor, so I fail to see your point tbh.
Actually you can do a complex server-side code just creating an nodejs box connecting to firebase and using Firebase Queues to submit tasks from front to backend.
For example, try making a simple app that let’s you upload images.
After the Google I/O 2016 (re)launch of the Firebase, one of the features that Firebase provides is Storage, which lets you upload user-generated content (images, audio, video etc.)
A better question nowadays would be Meteor vs. (Firebase + Polymer), thanks to the polymer-fire web component, which brings the data into the template much like {{#each tasks}} does in Blaze.
I just met a guy at a cafe who said his team spent two months building a Meteor + React app, then they switched to Polymer w/Firebase and rebuilt it in two weeks. I suggested that was because they made all the hard decisions during development of the Meteor app, but he swore it was because of the easy of data-binding in Polymer/Firebase. Anyone else have a similar story to share?
Has anyone here actually switched to Meteor w/React from Polymer w/Firebase?
Meteor is an open source platform considering best web application framework in Github, With Meteor developer gets resources from previous frameworks and libraries to develop a prototype application first and then move on to build a full fledged application which is not applicable in other platforms. Further, Meteor gives you the liberty to work on just one language and that is JavaScript.
Meteor helps to build apps by writing less number of codes such as, a collaborative task management application (to-do app) can be developed by writing less than 600 lines of codes.
I also advised you to go through this post to know the difference between major platforms: bit.ly/2eEwCOb
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with the help of cloud function you can write backend code in ur firebase app