Meteor 0.5.3 Released: Deployment Settings, Minimongo, Spark, Accounts

Just to clarify something, Derby apps aren't single page apps. They render on both the server and the client which means that it's just as multi-page as any normal website. The distinction is that once you load the page, in most browsers, the page never has to refresh. Data is sent through the wire and the client renders the HTML.

Disable javascript and visit http://phishvids.com – everything works as if it were a normal website. The server handles all of the rendering.

I had a very bad experience with Derby (apps autogenerated with stable or HEAD version always crashed), so I decided to try Meteor.

I was doubtful at first. After generating a simple app that automatically included Bootstrap, Backbone, jQuery, Underscore, MongoDB, user registration and Facebook sign-in, I started to become very happy with it. I was also able to add basic user security (edit only your own database items) very easily. Deployment worked just like they said it would (create a tarball and just run it on your server with Node.js).

So, even if Meteor is a bit limited (only a few packages available) and still needs to mature, it feels right. It seems to provide exactly the right things for building web apps, in a way that "just works".

I still plan to try Derby once it's fixed but I expect it will be more about hacking and tweaking than things just working.

Never heard about Derby before. I'm going to have make new project which primary client are mobiles (at the beginning through web browser, later dedicated app). It's seems that Derby manages this task much better, and has better architectural decisions (easily working with different components like Angular, Redis ...). The only thing which wonder me is Derbys scalability issues https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/derbyjs/.... But Meteor also doesn't manage it well.

I suggest you just decide to make something small, that does not have to be released. For example: Do you use Zabbix, Nagios or anything like it? Make a website that fetches some info from another site and displays it using javascript.