Ask HN: Is Meteor(JS framework) is dying slowly? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Meteor(JS framework) is dying slowly?

3 pointsanaganisk3 comments

I am not trying to assume anything here, but I recently read a blog post about the Kadira's(meteor analytics platform) shut down claiming poor ROI, and it also seems like meteor developers are shifting their focus towards Apollo(GraphQl based) framework. Does it mean meteor may be eclipsed soon? Many people complain that meteor is too much magic and full of surprises to develop enterprise grade apps, and it seems like meteor depends mostly on Galaxy for ROI. Given that meteor is not used much by enterprises, will developers slowly shift to Apollo(since GraphQL is in trend right now)?

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Hi, Meteor cofounder and CEO here :)

Our Meteor business is thriving and we beat our 2016 revenue goal by almost 40%, driven by strong Galaxy growth. We expect that to continue into 2017 based on what we heard from a survey of Meteor/Galaxy users that we did recently – they are using Meteor for mission critical apps and most of them plan to write more Meteor apps in 2017. In line with this, we are growing our Meteor open source team while also continuing to ramp up our work on Apollo.

The big difference between Meteor and Apollo is that Meteor is about new app development (specifically in JavaScript), and Apollo is about a data system that you can add to already-existing apps that are running in production at meaningful scale. There's a place for both of these things and a lot of overlap between them.

Meteor isn't going to take over all JavaScript development the way Rails took over Ruby development, at least not anytime soon. That's just not how the JavaScript ecosystem works. However, I think it will be the #1 full stack JavaScript framework for a long time to come and will continue to be a really great option for teams that want to build JavaScript apps quickly, especially apps that have a realtime or collaborative element.

Meteor is not dying, it's just evolving towards more openness and modularity, which is what people have been asking for all along.

This does mean some pieces of Meteor (like its front-end framework Blaze, for example) might become obsolete, but overall it's a good thing.

For reference (I had to look Apollo up) -

MeteorJS: https://www.meteor.com

Apollo Graph Client: http://dev.apollodata.com

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