Hacker News Reader

Comment by pluma | Hacker News Reader

> Meteor: the missing infrastructure for building great React apps

Extremely bold words as usual. I don't think I've ever seen any JS technology that manufactures as much hype as Meteor. Every single article from Meteor makes it sound like the best thing since sliced Jesus.

Are there any reliable numbers on Meteor adoption (and retention)? If you listen to people using Meteor it's already more popular than jQuery but everybody else seems apathetic at best. If you go by Stackoverflow numbers (which Meteor shows off on its homepage), it's merely 1/10th as popular as AngularJS (and roughly as popular as express, which never even came close in terms of hype).

View on HN

If you try building a realtime single page app using Meteor and measure the amount of time it took you to complete it, you'll find that the hype is justified.

But at the expense of performance? I've written a number of applications in Meteor and continually struggle to scale them, even to tens of concurrent users.

Well http://mostexclusivewebsite.com/ currently has 46,000 users concurrently connected, in-line, receiving live updates, waiting for a ticket. So yeah, I would go so far as to say that Meteor can be scaled pretty well.

I've just tried to access the site and it's failing to load half the time, and the other half it's taking over a minute to load. It's awesome you're getting traffic but I'm not sure you can say you've successfully scaled your app right at the moment.

I build stuff with React but never tried with Meteor. But I looked at it, and if you watch the introduction video where he creates something and deploy in like 2 minutes you would go wow as well. It's definitely the most exciting "new" thing I've seen along with React.

Rapid prototyping is an easy win. The real question is how a framework holds up in production. A lot of gripe from long time users of AngularJS comes from Angular's problems in real-world production scenarios (e.g. large amount of data means two-way binding kills performance but two-way binding is what makes the prototypes so compelling; third party directives make it easy to do all kinds of things but writing your own directives can be difficult and disillusioning; etc).

Basically, the important question to ask when being dazzled by impressively easy deployment demos is: is this representative of what my experience will be like developing a real-world medium to large scale production app?

So far my impression of Meteor has been that it's only achieving that "simplicity" by completely ignoring problems like initial page load. Delivering a placeholder on initial page load is an anti-pattern, especially for a technology pretending it's the only "truly isomorphic" technology out there.

> The real question is how a framework holds up in production

You're completely right, and that's why I'm also very skeptical about this framework. I'll see how it holds up in a year or two before using it.

libscore ranks js library usage by crawling sites:

Meteor = 86 sites

http://libscore.com/#Meteor

React = 552 sites

http://libscore.com/#React

angular = 6,882 Sites

http://libscore.com/#angular

backbone = 9,853 Sites

http://libscore.com/#Backbone

That's pretty damning for Meteor. I'd have ranked it similarly to React with the difference being that Meteor more actively markets itself and React is mostly being promoted by third parties.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com