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Comment by rezistik | Hacker News Reader

A couple of things really bother me about Meteor.js.

One, the Atomosphere package manager site is insanely slow and buggy. Everything feels like it takes forever to render or rerender. Opening the side menu is a jaggy experience.

If performance is that terrible on a super simple list of packages how terrible is it on an actually reactive site?

Two, I've never seen an article on meteor that wasn't also an advertisement. They all list how easy it is to start a project or add a package as the main draw. That and constant connectivity/"reactive" application structure.

It just feels too orchestrated.

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What kind of article are you looking for? I talk about all kind of Meteor related stuff on my blog.

Don't confuse your circle of vision on twitter/hackernews/etc as a limited view of what is actually going on in the Meteor community.

Have you ever looked at a Devshop talk?

As for Atmosphere, I would love to pitch in and help but they haven't bothered to open source it yet (and sounds like they won't).

Try http://fastosphere.meteor.com/, judge speed based on that :)

Is it possible the site is just a little over-designed? I'm not sure it's fair to judge an entire full-stack framework over the front-end of a single site.

I've visited Atmosphere from time to time and while performance wasn't as optimal as it could be with a less sophisticated design, it was never what I would call 'jaggy'.

Usually I would agree, but this is a website built by the team behind the framework. When you're making a tool for people to use you really need to put your best foot forward.

Atmosphere is built by Percolate Studio. I know Tom Coleman works there, but as far as I know, he's not a part of the MDG.

He should be given how good Iron Router is, but that's another issue :)

You are correct, MDG has nothing to do with Atmosphere.

Recently someone posted a fast alternative to Atmosphere to the user mailing list: http://fastosphere.meteor.com/ I think it uses Atmosphere's DDP connection so it should be up to date.

@rezistik: I've been working on a site called The Meteor Chef for the past couple of months and think some of the stuff I've covered will give you a solid idea of Meteor's power. The focus is on implementations of features for Meteor apps in the form of "recipes," so it's much less about _why_ Meteor is cool and more of a demonstration.

http://themeteorchef.com/

@rglover, I'm actually about to do a side project for a family friend. I'd really like it to be something I could do quickly. Basic crud dealing with a lot of inputs, but I want to use Postgres.

What's meteor got for me?

I am honestly interested, as much as the marketing edge of Meteor annoys me I'd like to believe there is some truth to some of the hype.

What does meteor have for you? Well, not so much right now. Crud applications talking to SQL isn't its focus point.

You want to build apps quickly that automatically sync up between uses (think google docs) and like using mongo? Then there is a LOT of goodness to be had with meteor.

I've written a lot of meteor apps. It is really really good, but not for everything.

Here's an example of a really simple CRUD app. To give you an idea, I literally just wrote this in the last 10 minutes.

https://gist.github.com/themeteorchef/aa48a086824d9736033d

I added some inline comments to explain how everything is tied together, but if you have questions shoot me an email/gchat! ryan.glover@themeteorchef.com.

If you're looking to build a quick CRUD app, Meteor would be a great candidate.

Edit: In this example, the interaction would be when I type a taco name into the field provided and click "submit," it would immediately appear in my tacos list :)

I do like the choice in entity to construct.

I'm open to giving it a look, but honestly I really love ES6, React and Express. I can't think of much reason to leave them anytime soon.

I've been known to be tempted. And if it really increases productivity the way the marketing claims than I can see it's use case at the company I work for as well.

My fear is kind of two fold.

One I really like the NodeJS micro-modules/micro services architecture. I like being able to consider each entity of an application it's own application. It's really easy to scale, it's really easy to completely replace portions of the application when I want to update them.

Second, I don't like 'automagic', I found both Rails and Ember really awful for me personally. I had to constantly check the documentation to understand what is expected of each layer, and there are always so many layers.

Last question if you'll continue to indulge me. I prefer functional programming to OO, since Meteor is reactive is it safe to assume it is also geared towards a functional paradigm?

Re: functional programming, yes. Meteor is very agnostic to a specific pattern/structure, so you're able to organize your application however you see fit. There are definitely "automagic" functions that they give you, but it's more of a "box of legos" mindset than "build this model of this airplane and if all the parts aren't organized by the manual, you will fail."

You can bring your own way of thinking and work it into Meteor. The platform has conventions, for sure (e.g. client code vs. server code), but none that force you into a rigid way of writing your code.

Is that what you're asking (I'm not much of a programmers programmer so my terminology is spotty)?

Edit: give it a try, but if you have a preference for writing your apps: work with that. The marketing bullshit is just that: marketing. Meteor is great, but it's not for everyone or every application. Instead of getting caught up in the woo, it's helpful to play with it for an afternoon to see if it maps to your mental model of what an application should (or could) look like. If not, stick with what ya like :)

(MDG-er here) On #2, I think you may enjoy browsing https://www.meteor.com/projects. :-) Lots of meaty technical detail on the different subprojects that make up the Meteor stack.

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