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Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

> Meteor has yet to establish itself as a mainstream development technology on the same level as Rails or even vanilla Node.js... almost four years after Meteor first launched, I have to admit I thought the framework would be more widespread by now. So what happened?

A more general answer, I feel like the web programming world doesn't really need new frameworks, does it? Rails or Django got mainstream adoption because there was a need at the time, likewise with frontend JS frameworks (which seems to be consolidating around just 2 - React and Angular), and likewise with Node as filling a need for easy async. I'm not that knowledgeable on Meteor [1], however I think by default it's reasonable to expect no new frameworks to have mainstream adoption without a major change to the web.

[1] I don't know if Meteor's x-platform appeal is enough to convert users from other x-platform, native and/or hybrid solutions (Ionic, Titanium, RubyMotion, etc.).

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I'm far from being an Ember-fan, but it's still going well too, even if it doesn't have as much hype as the two poster boys.

As for Angular, I feel like it's still too early to tell how it will end up - I loved Angular 1.X but eventually switched to React because it was much more convenient and only required minimal boilerplate. Angular 2 doesn't really make we want to switch back in its current state.

>I feel like the web programming world doesn't really need new frameworks, does it? Rails or Django got mainstream adoption because there was a need at the time

Of course we do. Those frameworks appeared because what was available at the time wasn't perfect. Rails/ Django addressed a number of pain points and made more rapid development possible. But development still takes time and creates bugs, so there's still room to improve.

Plus coders are always going to reinvent the wheel, so frameworks will continue to appear.

I don't see evidence for consolidation around front end JS (http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/javascript-library). We'll probably be stuck with yet another framework syndrome for a while...

backbone.marionette, anyone? its maintainers are kicking around incremental-dom ideas..

"likewise with frontend JS frameworks"

And jQuery. Probabil still the most used JS library.

I believe this is correct to the point where jQuery is synonymous with javascript and thus doesn't need to be even mentioned. Plus jQuery isn't really a framework.

I strongly disagree, there are many people (myself included) who strongly discourage the use of jQuery. There are much better solutions out there that follow the "do one thing well" philosophy.

I see jQuery mainly as a library to eliminate browser differences.

jQuery is not a framework, though (neither is react but people usually mean using it with a flux or flux-like library, like baobab, when they say react. jQuery has no such go-to companion).

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