Meatier – A Meteor alternative
github.com
github.com
Look, the web is a fast evolving platform. Similarly, the best way to understand the tradeoffs a framework makes is write your own own! You probably shouldn't use it in production, but it's a good exercise. And writingcode is so easy to do (just code for awhile!) that we're getting a proliferation of it. This is a good thing!
I just wrote a carousel widget in jquery. Yeah, I know there are 10million carousel widgets I could have downloaded, but I wanted to understand it better so I made it on my own. (And yeah, I know carousels suck, tell my company's marketers that.)
We don't hear complaints when people try building new game engines from scratch. Granted, maybe those aren't posted on HN often?
@minionslave, @untog, @sergiotapia, looking at you guys.
// edit: And looking at the github page, this isn't really a new framework anyway? It's like... the web-dev equivalent of a review paper. He looked at meteor's stack, and swapped a lot of the component pieces. And that's cool and informative.
Replacing one monolithic structure with another one because the component parts aren't right? Just skip the monolith part and use the components you want.
That's what he did. Anybody is free to use it or not...
I'm starting to think a part of the javascript fatigue is caused by people complaining.
What eventually happened was that developers largely abandoned desktop software development, instead moving to the web. They were helped along by the malware epidemic of the early 2000s, which made consumers reluctant to try any new desktop software for fear that it would pwn their computer, and by the cross-platform nature of the web. Anyway, the problem became irrelevant, C++ usage shrunk back to the complex high-performance domains for which it remained uniquely suited, and now Javascript is the "too popular for its own good" lingua franca. Ironically, C++ now has a pretty solid standard library and a core of common best practices.
Makes me wonder if we'll see a similar transition in a couple years where people abandon the web for a new computing platform (or native mobile platforms?). The confusion is there, as is the consumer adoption, but we haven't yet had a compelling trigger the way that malware was a compelling trigger for the end of the desktop era. Privacy, maybe.
For those that didnt read more than the title, it's database agnostic. It scales vertically and horizontally. It's not a framework, frameworks are dead. Its just a bunch of packages that fit together like Lego pieces.
If you don't need these things (or don't know what they are) don't complicate your life! Get off HN and build something :-)
One thing I'm concerned with in general with stacks like this is their use in mobile stuff - even React+React Router+Redux+redux-form adds a fair bit to a payload, even before you start developing an app. As nice as it is to use, for mobile I roll my own.
"Meteor is awesome! But after 3 years, it's starting to show it's age."
Edit: Reading more into it, this is just a starter kit and not a replacement for Meteor. You lose everything that made Meteor insanely popular, for what exactly? RethinkDB?
Isn't that under their list of complaints about Meteor?
- RethinkDB - React - GraphQL - Redux - Webpack - Node 5
Look, I get you want to play around with all the new toys for a hobby project. But no professional developer can afford the cost of getting burned by switching to a brand new framework and running into bugs. Meteor gives you the toys a little bit later (I know, web developers find 6 months to be an eternity), but at least you get them when they're proven and stable. Start developing real apps for real companies and you'll see the value of that.
Still it doesn't solve my main problem with Meteor adoption. Right now if you would like to use Meteor you need to start from scratch using specified database. That limit adoption a lot. I would love if Meteor could be adopted more incrementally by companies (e.g. write collaboration layer to your existing app).
Very interesting as a complete web app starter kit
Imagine is Microsoft released a totally new version of C# every year, and stops supporting it.
Why do you feel the need to categorize people based on the programming language that they used to write some code? I prefer "JavaScript people" to needlessly condescending people any day of the week.
> "This system works fine, but we've been using it for too long, let's just rewrite it with the latest greatest"
This is an uncharitable, unhelpful and totally unnecessary dismissal of this project. The author clearly explains the reasoning behind this project and even charts out each individual distinction. This isn't new for new's sake; features like CSS Modules and code splitting are real features that have real productivity impacts. Perhaps you don't think these features are useful or maybe you prefer a different technique for solving these problems, but either way nobody is forcing you to use it.
> Imagine is Microsoft released a totally new version of C# every year, and stops supporting it.
Except this is a completely inapt analogy. This is one individual who put together a package to solve their own problems and open sourced the code FOR FREE. If the endless supply of JavaScript tooling is a problem for you, that's your problem, you're not obligated to use or even evaluate every project that hits the front page of HN and if you're not a JavaScript programmer then I don't see why you even care.
Quit bitching about people building things you don't like.
You realise this is the opposite of that? Common, popular, existing tools, working together out of the box, replacing something that's generally regarded as weird and custom by the general JS community?
I'm not a frontend person. I'm backend and middleware and infrastructure, although I'm trying to figure out the front end stuff.
Maybe I just don't understand what people are trying to accomplish. In fact, I'm sure of that. I can't for the life of me figure out why you would want to have your front end so tightly coupled to you database.
Can someone explain to me in simple terms how and where I would use one of these JS frameworks in the context of a Python or Golang or Ruby/Rails app?
Expressive, concise code is always a good thing.
Meteor is excellent for MVPs and POCs; there are a lot of people out there with big ideas, but limited budgets to test out those ideas.
In Meteor, you can access your collections from the client and the server; and the vast number of packages on atmosphere makes writing a webapp in Meteor feel more like assembling lego than anything.
The speed at which we can write software is tightly correlated with our ability to innovate quickly; test things out, keep what works and throw away what doesn't.
I've developed things for clients in Meteor, in a matter of weeks what others have failed to deliver in year
90% or so startups fail, not because your front and backend were too tightly coupled, but because of a whole variety of other reasons. Given that most of that code will end up in the bin anyway, might as well focus on quantity, and switch to something more robust when need be.