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Comment by mmikeff | Hacker News Reader

Is the real time nature of Meteor important to your product?

I ask because I'm considering trying Meteor to prototype some ideas none of which particularly need real-time data updates in the client.

Would I be better off with some alternative framework or is meteor still super quick to pick up and get stuff done for 'regular' web apps? Being able to knock an idea out quickly vastly outweighs any kind of scalability concerns and most performance concerns.

(Bearing in mind that I am familiar with JS and Android development, free time for noodling on personal projects is in very short supply and not got the time to learn a totally new language)

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That's a good question. I've been learning and using Meteor for a few months and my projects do not require reactivity at their core.

Meteor is built around reactivity, and there is some overhead built in to the platform to make it possible, but it's pretty easy to design things so your app isn't overloaded by trying to "real time all the things".

The simplest step is to structure publications so as to deliver the least amount of reactive data needed at each step of the user experience. Another important approach is to understand what forces re-computations and re-renderings and try to minimize them when you can.

It's also possible to serve non-reactive data (meteor-dumb-collections) and obviate many performance concerns related to reactivity.

The speed and relative ease of working with Meteor makes this approach well worth it to me.

Also worth noting is that many of the production apps built with Meteor are not billed as a "real time solution to x". I suspect they have also spent a good amount of time designing around reactivity so they only take advantage of it where it's useful.

Thnx, good suggestions

Not really, for me it has been kind of a bonus added on top of an already great framework. So far I have really enjoyed it just for the fact that I can load a bunch of test data into Mongo and instantly see it work with my UI. However since I have read many people complain about performance and scalability in meteor I have tried to minimize the mount of database reads and reactive data I am dealing with for any one page.

The lack of free time was a big incentive for me also. I suggest at least taking the hour or so to go through the tutorial. It was very straightforward and I was able to breeze through it with little to no web developer experience, and instantly be able to use the simple concepts I learned to start working on my own project.

Meteor tutorial here I come.

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