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Comment by Siyfion | Hacker News Reader

It's completely different from ES6, it's a full-stack framework, so it does SO much more than just a front-end framework.

Meteor's main selling point is the reactivity; you can call `Books.insert({ name: "test" });` on the client, in-browser and it then updates the UI optimistically, updates the DB on the server AND propagates the change to all other clients, which in turn updates their UIs. All with one line of code.

Take a look at DDP, one of the core building-blocks of Meteor: https://www.meteor.com/ddp

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Is DDP or Meteor really needed though? Couldn't you easily set this up with RethinkDB using its Changefeeds killer feature for real-time + socket.io along with whatever other library/frameworks you want to use without ever touching Meteor?

Yes, you totally can, but I found running one command:

curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh

so much quicker (in the short term and long term) than reading a myriad of tutorials and then bashing my head against this configuration of several products for multiple weeks to get what Meteor provides as part of a single maintained and updated system.

If you're willing to wait for a client-server round trip to visibly see your changes, then sure. Otherwise, you'll need a way to temporarily (optimistically) change your in-browser data model with the updates while waiting for the server to commit your changes, then figure out a way to reconcile the server commit of v2 while you might have done v3 on the client in the meantime... Optimistic updates are not at all trivial. Meteor has a ton of code that basically runs an in-RAM version of MongoDB and keeps it in sync with the server.

It turns out to not be that simple. My coworker Slava has a talk about exactly this question: http://info.meteor.com/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-real-t...

(I work at Meteor)

You'll still miss out on the client side optimistic updates.

I think the main benefit of Meteor is not that it's impossible to do what it does with other libraries/frameworks, but how easy it makes those things for you.

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