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Comment by elchief | Hacker News Reader

"Project Foo: The Greatest Thing Ever". What is that? I should look into that.

A year or two later. "Project Foo: Total Crap". Glad I didn't look into that.

Meteor is different. It's been over 4 years. It's not going anywhere. It has more stars on GitHub than Rails.

If you haven't looked into it, and you're in a remotely adjacent field, you're behind. Even if you don't decide to use it. The ideas underpinning the framework are very progressive and sure to continue in some form even if Meteor itself ultimately doesn't.

With all that said, I think Meteor is simply going through some growing pains. Given how ambitious its vision is, it simply can't avoid them. I look forward to Sacha's next, hopefully more optimistic, post!

> It has more stars on GitHub than Rails.

Nope. Nope. GitHub stars was never a good reason to choose a framework. How about we compare real businesses out there?

Airbnb, Square, Twitter, GitHub, Basecamp, etc for Rails. What's there for Meteor?

I'm not saying the # of GitHub stars is a good reason to choose a framework.

But it is an indicator of it being something more than not-just-another-stupid-shiny framework that cannot be immediately dismissed.

I'd disagree--a lot of the JS folks I've met are like magpies and will star anything that looks remotely interesting on Github. It is exactly chasing shiny.

I normally treat stars as a bookmark, rather than as a declaration that I believe this is High Quality Work. Rather it's more along the lines of "I want to be able to find this easily at home when I have spare time next week".

There are too many JS frameworks/platforms/libraries to keep up with. I can't spend my time investigating them all. I've heard of Meteor several times but in my mind it was associated with (a) real-time apps, and (b) not free. I'm guessing that was because it is the free alternative to a paid thing? Anyway, that's what stuck in my head so I've ignored this one.

Is looking at GitHub stars a recommended way to find the best frameworks? Or what would you suggest for that?

I recently started looking at Nodal since it was mentioned here on HN a couple weeks ago. It looks pretty cool at first glance but I haven't tried building anything with it yet. (I don't have infinite time.)

I remember when there was Prototype.js vs jQuery vs Yahoo's library vs MooTools vs fill-in-the-blank. I only switched to jQuery when virtually everyone else had. Until then I stuck with Prototype because its the one I already knew (because I tried it first), even though I had played with jQuery a little bit.

So, again I say there are just too many frameworks to keep up with. (And ask if anyone has a good site / method for dealing with this.)

There's nothing (I know of) with a more radical approach to the full-stack web than Meteor.

No one's saying you need to keep up with all the JS frameworks, but if I were hiring a JS dev, I'd expect the person to understand the pros and cons of the most important ones. Meteor is categorically one of the most important JS frameworks out there.

I'm not sure about a way to determine the "best" or "most important" frameworks. Perhaps number of appearance on the HN front page could be a heuristic?

"Not free" is not quite right. The software is open-source & MIT licensed. The entity is for-profit, as it intends to sell services adjacent to the software, not unlike Acquia & Drupal.

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