Comment by sonnym | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sonnym | Hacker News Reader

After seeing the first, extremely slick demo of meteor, I was, as I believe a lot of people were, extremely excited to see where the project would go. Then came the funding, and some twelve or sixteen months of development, and I finally decided to dive in.

I really wanted to like it. I was predisposed to do so.

But from the very beginning, I was confronted with something I consider a deal breaker. While I am wary and generally disinclined toward the increasingly popular pattern of curl an installation script and pipe into sh, in this case it is not only skeptical, it is downright ludicrous. Why would I, nay anyone, want to install an npm package this way? Should not the installation instructions simply be `npm install -g meteor`? And what if I need to work on multiple meteor projects with different versions? Surely there is support for adding it to your package.json file, but why is this not the primary means of installation and well documented?

Maybe I am being overly sensitive to these issues, but it really baffled me that the very foundation upon which a meteor project is predicated would be contradictory to the typical node workflow. I will probably try meteor to spike out a project at some point in time, but I do not foresee myself using it extensively in the near future.

Meteor is a lot more than an npm package. For example, if you type these four commands..

$ curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh; meteor create myapp; cd myapp; meteor

you're up and running with a complete stack including MongoDB, node, the dozen-ish core packages that make up the Meteor pubsub and realtime templating stack, and the 'meteor' build tool (which can do things like compile coffeescript and less, generate source maps, minify your production code, and provide a realtime development environment where whenever you save a file your app updates in your browser.)

As for versioning, it's actually got a great way of doing that. Each of your Meteor projects is locked to a specific Meteor release version (similar to an Ubuntu release, it's a release-engineered snapshot of the Meteor core packages), which you can set with the `meteor update` command. And this has automatic `npm shrinkwrap` integration so that if you use npm packages alongside Meteor packages, everyone on your team is always running exactly the same versions of all of the code in your app. The Meteor tools automatically handle all the work of downloading any needed Meteor versions and keeping them installed side-by-side on your laptop, using the correct one for a given project, and notifying you of available updates.

I want to like meteor.

It sounds like the installation script, aside from handling the MongoDB and node setup, could be treated like a typical node package. Based on the fact that meteor has no package.json, seemingly none of those core packages are installed via npm either.

I may be alone in this, but I guess I would just prefer if my web framework expected me to have the interpreter and database installed, and used the package manager already provided for this environment.

Meteor does feel a little heavy (especially when you get around to deploying it) but take a look at demeteorizer, at https://github.com/onmodulus/demeteorizer

It converts Meteor apps into more traditional node.js with a package.json

Demeteorizer is a offensively named script that automatically builds a package.json for you. It doesn't make Meteor apps lighter weight or anything like that. It simply makes it easier for you to install the requisite npm dependencies.

While it would be trivially easy to port the Meteor installer to npm, since Meteor doesn't require node or npm to be installed, it would be a step backward to do so.

Meteor is built against specific node and npm versions and the install script installs the necessary node binaries.

Considering what Meteor brings a developer, getting hung up on the install method is missing the big picture.

Thank you.

Saying that Node has a package manager is a huge understatement. Node has one hell of a package manager, but you have to hack[1] around Meteor to use npm modules, even in the latest version.

My impression of Meteor, and the impression a number of node people seem to share, and which I've seen reinforced on HN, is:

Meteor is in an almost adversarial relationship with the node.js open-source community, because while they're good hackers building something cool, they took millions of dollars in funding[2] and want to keep their options open for monetizing that codebase.

This makes every decision they make differently than other open-source real-time frameworks (to build their own package manager, require a contributor agreement on an MIT licensed project, and use a nonstandard install process[3,4]) considerably more worrisome.

And it's frustrating, because there's nothing going on in Meteor that necessitates going outside of the "node.js ecosystem" -- aka NPM [4,5,6].

That impression might be unfair in some way, and obviously the meteor people spend a lot of time responding to just these sort of concerns from the node.js community.

But "Meteor" means "worry" to me.

---

[1] http://meteorhacks.com/complete-npm-integration-for-meteor.h... [2] http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/meteor-funding/ [3] https://atmosphere.meteor.com/ [4] https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/516#issuecomment-12919... [5] http://derbyjs.com/ [6] https://github.com/substack/node-browserify

I'm not sure what your problem with contributor agreements are; basically every sizable open source project has one. You know, like... Node: http://nodejs.org/cla.html

Meteor is awesome. It considerably simplifies web-development. I just want to let the core team know that many many people really appreciate your efforts and I sincerely hope that negative comments such as those by Mr. Luc don't discourage your team and do not distract you from the really awesome work you are doing.

Well, all of Meteor is under a MIT license, so if we think we're going to "monetize that codebase" we're pretty stupid :) I'm not a lawyer but I think that under the MIT license there's basically nothing that we can do with the code that you can't do too. Our actual plan is to sell operational tools for larger companies that have mission-critical Meteor apps in production.

The incredible amount of work that we've put into JavaScript build tools over the last two years has all been with the aim of creating a radically easier, faster developer experience, because we know that that's incredibly powerful marketing for the rest of our crazy ideas. In other words, we did it because we thought that the UX of the existing JavaScript tooling was just too janky. Seriously, try Meteor for yourself and see what you think -- maybe you think our work sucks and that we wasted our time, but if so, I wish you would just tell me that (I would genuinely love to know) instead of reading ulterior motives into what was a labor of love and a ton of hard work.

Of course there are many rough edges and it's not done (that's why it's not 1.0 yet) but from people that have actually used it for a while, we actually get the opposite feedback, which is that they want us to go much further down this path, and that's why we continue to slave away at what is by far the least fun part of building a framework.

Hmm. I've actually changed my mind, (though not about their rejection of npm) -- after digging around, I see that there's been more communication about how Meteor plans to make money, and hearing that they have feasible plans that don't sound like a conflict of interest with open source is better than any technical argument for assuaging concerns.

But about me 'imputing bad motives', or whatever -- I said "worry", and "almost adversarial", and I stand by that.

When a company pops up and says "Hi, we're from Silicon Valley, and we have a plan to monetize a framework made from your language of choice; we have VC funding and we leap-frogged similar community frameworks -- now, if you want to write apps with the new hotness, please use our new package manager instead of the excellent community one, and don't install our framework with the community standard method either" ...

You worry. You just do. I think that meteor/derby/etc style app dev is the future, so I'm worried by anything that might threaten to lock it down.

I'm glad to see that upon investigation that worry is diminished, though. And obviously I applaud your efforts in advancing that future (I just wish that it were done in an 'npm install meteor' way).

Out of curiosity, I tried doing an 'npm install meteor' and found that it actually exists right now (but it perhaps isn't official, it hasn't been kept up to date (meteor 0.5.2 compared to the current 0.6.6), and I don't know if it is equivalent to installing meteor the official way).

Don't get too hung up on the installation. I think their point was to make setup/installation/getting excessively simple.

With regard to why not "npm install -g meteor", I think the short answer is that the Meteor installation setups up/installs a lot more than just one node package.

Seems to me like you're throwing the baby out with the bath water. I personally think that's a mistake, but in any case if you don't want to run that command on your own machine, you can always try out Meteor with something like https://www.nitrous.io/

It is not about the running of the command - I read the installation script, and it looks fine.

It is about my desire to work on a node application in what I consider to be a standard way. I want to be able to treat my entire application as a node package, leveraging npm for dependency resolution.

Think of it like a rails application. For local development, you probably use rbenv (or rvm), bundler, and have the version of rails you need listed in your Gemfile. You allow the package manager provided with the language and maybe a layer to keep environments separated (already provided by npm) to take care of dependency resolution and updates.

I want a node framework where I can use the package.json file as one does the Gemfile for ruby applications.

Well, Meteor isn't really just a Node framework. Why not evaluate it on its own merits?

it's because your getting a full mongo database installed and configured with it

npm install -g meteorite

Then create a site with it and specify whatever local version of meteor you want.

The deets: https://github.com/oortcloud/meteorite/

Meteor version locking is in core now (as of 0.6.0), and the rest of Meteorite (fetching packages from Atmosphere) will be folded into core as part of 1.0 :)

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