Meteor Acquires YC Alum FathomDB for Its Development Platform | Hacker News Reader

Meteor Acquires YC Alum FathomDB for Its Development Platform

techcrunch.com

55 pointsarbesfeld16 comments

"... there are now plenty of companies that have raised more than $7 million each that run almost completely using the Meteor framework ..." - anyone know who some of those companies are? I'd love to see some large-scale examples of Meteor running in the wild.

Off the top of my head, Lookback.io (https://lookback.io) raised $2.2M and Workpop raised $7.9M (http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/16/workpop/).

Lots more: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-startups-using-Meteor

Wait, MeteorJS was funded? I'm starting to think investors are strangely out of touch with the projects they throw money at. Famo.us is the one that stands out the most to me; I have no idea how they got funding or were able to pay employees. Now Famo.us is open source, like it should have always started as, with nowhere to go for investors. Meteor seems like a similar thing, a web framework of sorts with no concrete way to monetize, also in a very weird niche space (Famo.us for people who think they can get away with not making native apps, Meteor for people who think they can get away with undocumented voodoo in their web development). Now Meteor somehow has enough money to purchase a database company? It seems like the only exit they could have is sell their souls to enterprise. Look at Django, which is a complete, robust, mature framework compared to Meteor's collection of magic. Django is a non-profit entity, which makes sense for this type of software. We've all built a web framework or animation library in our spare time, since when did investors start dishing out cash thinking these things were monetizeable?

To me this just smells of bubble, of too much money for too small projects / markets. Of course Meteor could start expanding to new products and do something unrelated to an MVC framework, but there's no mention of that right now.

So meteor is a long-term thing and I see a lot of ways for them to make a lot of money. And so far they've been executing amazingly well and they're focusing on the right audience for this time.

This is long term/platform play. Think wordpress. The problems they are solving are not easy to solve. They are executing well! Worst case, one of snoozefest enterprise shops will just buy the whole thing.

I believe one of Meteor's intended, future revenue streams will be as a service provider for Meteor applications. If you take a look at the Meteor trello-board (https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap) it is listed as Galaxy.

As a Meteor developer, I would pay for a solution that allowed me to use Meteor's collection of magic on a platform that was built specifically to take advantage of said magic.

It's pretty obvious you haven't even bothered to do any research. Famo.us doesn't have a particularly good product, but it totally makes sense why they've been able to get funding - one of the cofounders of Famous sold a company for $100M. So to any VC it's a no-brainer to invest in him again.

Meteor has some really really smart people working on it, and they've repeatedly stated that they plan on monetizing by providing hosting/deployment services (a la WordPress). WordPress is a billion dollar company, in case you've forgotten.

> Of course Meteor could start expanding to new products and do something unrelated to an MVC framework, but there's no mention of that right now.

Visit http://meteor.com/about and you will find this:

> [...] a new platform for cloud applications that will become as ubiquitous as previous platforms such as Unix, HTTP, and the relational database.

Meteor is not "an MVC framework", it is a platform for creating applications. The investment seems to reflect the ambition described on this page and after having watched them execute over the past two years, I'm glad they're funded, because it clearly enabled them to continue working on this without running out of steam and having to go back to their old jobs.

They have also been quite open about their future plans for making money, such as in the post announcing their funding back in 2012: https://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/07/25/meteors-new-112-milli...

> Eventually, we plan to make a commercial product too, called Galaxy. Galaxy will be a product that the operations department at a large company might buy. It'll be an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant hosting environment for Meteor apps.

The success of this future plateform obviously depends on the success of their core product.

The popularity of Rails proves that there are many developers who "think they can get away with undocumented voodoo in their web development".

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like every meteor site I see just feels a little ....off, for some reason, or just not as polished. Like the http://lookback.io site, the location of the navigation items at the top shifts slightly between pages, and completely when jumping from 'explore' to anything else. I've messed around with meteor and really like it, but I'm still waiting to see a "Made with Meteor" site that blows me away.

The change in navigation position you're seeing when navigating between pages other than Explore is caused by the browser displaying a scroll bar. The nav bar on the Explore page (for whatever reason) has an entirely different style applied.

This article is surprisingly light on details, and their websites seem to have few others. Does this mean that Meteor will support SQL databases for the 1.0 release?

I hope that to be the case as well. The way the data model works is pushing data updates back to the client through the mongodb cursor and this db solution should be able to provide that data update functionality

Experiments with Redis and other databases have been done, so SQL support will almost certainly arrive at some point.

It says in the article "the team isn’t so much excited about Fathom’s NoSQL and MySQL capabilities, but about its ability to watch how data changes and then push those changes out to users." At the moment meteor polls the db every 10 sec to see the changes which isn't very efficient or does oplog tailing if your mongodb has replica sets enabled, which can be much better for scaling (though more expensive/or more work). However, oplog doesn't really work for other dbs, i.e mysql,so I'm guessing FathomDB has been working on a better implementation then simply polling over the last couple of years. My guess is that they will try to abstract out the db layer, which is really tightly baked into meteor, so more dbs can be supported, though I think that will prob take quite a bit of time since its not in v1 release plan and they will most likely need to change how their packaging system works and some of their core system.

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