Hacker News Reader

Comment by hbbio | Hacker News Reader

"Meteor 0.5.0, available today, allows you to write secure realtime client-server applications in pure JavaScript. It's the only system of its kind in the world."

That's an outright lie. cf. http://opalang.org

View on HN

Apparently no one noticed that Derby.js has been able to integrate with Everyauth for over a month: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/derbyjs/7VWTclIBEw8/LsOiuvfz...

Derby vs. Meteor (by Derby): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842525

Full disclosure: I'm not a Derby contributor. I just played with it for some rapid prototyping.

>That's an outright lie. cf. http://opalang.org

While I agree with you wrt to there being other examples, and the original claim was wrong/false, it could be considered presumptuous to label this as 'an outright lie'.

Most people I know, and the internets, seem to agree that lying requires: intent to deceive.

Having chatted with Matt DeBergalis online and in person on occasion, he comes across rather honest in my admittedly subjective opinion (although welcome to hear contrary info). So if we accept that, then it seems unlikely he would intentionally allow the team to spread falsehood knowingly (especially if it's so easily refuted).

FWIW, I think Meteor is cool for certain camps and projects, but I also really like the 'pick and choose' NPM-friendly style of node development (in fact my personal preference at the moment is for an open modular ecosystem vs a monolithic framework with plenty of magic), so it's not like I have any particular emotional investment in saying this, other than to correct the record.

So in conclusion, this does not seem like a totally fair assessment of the author.

(And yes I realized you mentioned no-one by name, but a project website cannot 'lie'. At the end of the day, a person was still responsible for writing those words).

Notwithstanding Hanlon's razor, ignoring the existence of your competitors (Opa, Derby, SocketStream) would be a display of incompetence I don't expect from the Meteor team.

http://opalang.org/

http://derbyjs.com/

http://www.socketstream.org/

SocketStream http://socketstream.com lacks the media blitz, but it provides authentication and integrates with pretty much anything in NPM (one of the stated goals of the author), and still provides all the benefits of a real-time framework like Meteor (for more than a year now)

This is exactly why I love SocketStream. The extensibility of it is great. I can use one of the several thousand existing node modules/libraries and install them easily via NPM. In addition, development has been active and Owen (the lead dev) is extremely responsive to any issues on the GitHub repo.

He recently demo'd SS at LXJS 2012 - worth watching IMO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOS1lpWXphs

Thanks for the mention. I've just spoken at NodeDublin.com and released the first bit of very early code for SocketStream 0.4: https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream-0.4

It doesn't do much yet, but shows the direction I'm going in: More API based, pipeable Node Streams wherever possible, full npm / Node compatibility. Follow @socketstream for updates.

Also I want to congratulate the Meteor team on their release. Making scalable, reliable realtime web apps is hard and all work in this area benefits the entire community.

But aren't Opa applications written in Opa, not pure JavaScript?

There is Derby, http://derbyjs.com

And Socketstream

From the linked page:

  client function client_function(x, y) { ... }

This seems at least slightly different from "pure javascript". There are more examples on the page, particularly the neat sugar for database stuff.

I don't think it's accurate to say that this is an outright lie.

Opa generates pure JS code, even though it's indeed a variant of JavaScript with some added features (the ones you mention) and some removed. But then, there's also Derby and probably others.

What about nowjs? http://nowjs.com/

Now.js has been abandoned by its authors [0], and bitrot is creeping in. Someone stepped in to maintain it, but has barely touched it ever since [1].

0. https://github.com/Flotype/now/issues/208

1. https://github.com/jameskeane/now/commits/master/

nowjs has no concept of security.

Yeah Derby was doing what Meteor did months before Meteor was started.

Just curious, as I don't know enough about the two, what makes Opa similar enough to Meteor that the claim "[Meteor is] the only system of its kind in the world" is an outright lie?

The "only system of its kind" seemed broad enough to include Opa, which generates pure JS.

i think when they say "only system of it's kind" they mean they are solving all of these problems in different ways than all other systems... everything from rails to django to opa to derby to whatever.

I also have doubts about the effectiveness of their security, so I'd like to challenge that part of the statement too.

And the several years old Jaxer in Aptana IDE.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com