Thank You DHH (and others)

Meteor is so great that your blog post seems to load only 25% of the time on my 3G connection, freezing for no apparent reason on a useless "We work at Cintrifuse" page the rest of the time (without any indicator that it's loading anything - and leaving it untouched for 5min does not help).

Scaling is good, having your website actually work is IMO better.

Meteor is great, in that it's a really interesting look at what the future of web app development could look like - we've got ubiquitous JS runtimes on servers and clients, always-available internet connections, that kind of thing, and we need to be looking and playing with other approaches. And I think Meteor's is interesting.

But it's not going to 'kill' Rails any more than Rails killed PHP. I've seen loads of frameworks and indeed developers pop up who have taken the great ideas that frameworks like Rails had, and incorporated them into PHP projects. No doubt we'll see the same over time as new frameworks and tools arise elsewhere. And ultimately what we want is a better, more diverse selection of tools which are competing with and learning from each other.

Would I build a production app in Meteor? Almost certainly not. I'll probably have a crack at a prototype sometime soon (last time I tried, it was too underdeveloped to use) and no doubt I'll learn a bit on the way. But Differential's site is not an encouraging example - it requires JS, feels pretty slow and broken in places, and offers nothing that couldn't be executed as well (or better!) using any other toolset or framework.

This really hits the nail on the head for me. I discovered meteor when I was just beginning to seriously code web applications, and regardless of the downsides it has, it was truly, truly fun. The ability to rapidly go from idea to implementation is extremely fast, ridiculously simple to pick up, and it's all in a simple to learn language, even for an absolute beginner.

Would i build my production app in meteor right now? For a prototype, yes. Would I transition from an established web application with a large userbase to meteor? Almost definitely no, at the current stage. But what we glorify here in this startup culture is to get an idea out and see if it works, and Meteor is absolutely amazing for exactly that. The simple deployment, the ease of use, and the freedom to build the structure as you choose (for better or for worse) truly opens many, many more doors than it closes at the early stage.

I'm no fanboy but I'm very excited to see where Meteor heads in the future and am extremely glad that it continues to gain traction and attention, be it positive or negative.

If you're intrigued by Meteor and real-time apps but are turned off by the need to live in the Meteor ecosystem and the magicness of it all, I highly recommend checking out Feathers[1]. Feathers is built on top of Express and Socket.IO so there is no magic, all Express middleware works, and you can use whatever client-side framework you prefer, it just gives you the real-time benefits for free without the commitment you have to make by switching to a big framework like Meteor. (I'm not affiliated with Feathers, just a fan).

[1]http://feathersjs.com/

I really like coding in Meteor. When deciding instead of thinking as to whether I should use meteor I thought on why I shouldn't.

The main reason to not use it was scaling but It's evident the meteor guys are working on that for the 1.0 release. (See https://trello.com/board/meteor-roadmap/508721606e02bb9d5700...)

Hopefully they do this well but I feel from their work before they will. I've been using Meteor since it was sub v0.2 and its just improved each iteration.

First it was the license, then authentication, then it was routing, then its ability to play well with JQuery. Slowly all of the issues with it are disappearing.

One thing I like is in meteor code is isomorphic. And on the server I'm not in the callback hell I was having with node. So there are evented fibers that do all this stuff and the code remains clean! Best of both worlds.

Heads up - On every blog post it seems to be showing the same figure for "x other readers are here" which is misleading.

Just a heads up- your headshot flashes white every time a new reader loads or leaves your page and the XXX readers are here line updates. Its quite distracting now, since you're on the front page of HN and a lot of people are going to the article.

The future of the web isn't "everything in JavaScript" - it's everything in whatever damn language you like.

The JS runtime is nearly, or is now perhaps, perfectly capable of being what your own language "compiles" to - for instance, I love Ruby so I'm betting on Opal (execute REAL client-side Ruby). Others like JS variants such as CoffeeScript or TypeScript.

So...Rails isn't going to get killed - it's simply going to evolve to support rich real-time client + server apps written in Ruby, period. That's my take on it, anyway, and that's what I'm planning on.

I have a vague feeling of excitement about the future of JS development in general. Whether or not Meteor is going to be the bringer of that bright future is something I'm not so sure of.

On the topic of constructive criticism, differential.io could really do with ditching that "We work at Cintrifuse" interstitial before the blog post is displayed. In the spirit of being constructive, I will simply say that my experience as a reader would have been vastly better without it.

Thanks for all the great conversation guys and gals! I didn't post this, but I am glad it made it to HN for sure!

If you are looking to get into Meteor, check out http://yauh.de/articles/376/best-learning-resources-for-mete... and be sure to join http://crater.io to keep up on the latest news.

What do you use for the counter showing how many current users there are? GA API?