Meteor.js flourishes or withers?

Question

Node.js

How to understand Meteor.js is a promising thing or not? Developing or fading? They advised me to do it, but there is no desire to rush into the pool of desire. Are there experts in this topic - those who wrote on the meteor and can competently answer? I would be very grateful for the answers!

Answer 1

Disagree with the previous speaker (@geeek), in particular with the statement

In general, if you want to be in trend - take

- Meteor is not in trend at all.
If you give a short and sharp answer to the question "blooms or withers?" - I will answer: interest in Meteor is fading, despite all the efforts of the development team.
The company MDG (Meteor Development Group) raised $31M in investments ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meteor) and wanted to do everything cool, become mainstream, and then earn on hosting Meteor projects - such a monetization plan. By the way, they did the hosting. And at some point there was a lot of hype around Meteor, it seemed that everything was going according to plan. A year and a half ago, Meteor 1.0 was released (October 2014), then there were a couple of good releases that removed all the "dampness": Meteor 1.1 and 1.2.
But in the middle of 2015, it became clear that they did not become mainstream, now React!
Despite the ease of start and speed of development with Meteor, the following disadvantages were obvious:
1. Own package system with its central repository https://atmospherejs.com - look at the package download counters, these are crumbs compared to npm. Look at the development activity of the main packages - everything is very rotten.
2. Own assembly system. On the one hand, everything works out of the box, on the other hand, you can’t wedge into it (it’s difficult). Plus all sorts of strange conventions that everything is in the global namespace and your js files are loaded in alphabetical order. Meteor 1.3 partially solved the problem, there are rumors that webpack will be used in the future.
3. Own template engine blaze (similar to handlebars). In the beginning, blaze looked good, but now everyone is suddenly writing in React and many are rubbing their hands in anticipation of Angular 2, as a result, blaze turned out to be another bicycle with which it is not clear what to do.
4. Still Node 0.10 on the backend. Even with Node 0.12 Meteor no longer works due to some binary dependencies! They promised to update with support for Node 4 in future versions.
5. Meteor is heavily tied to MongoDb. To reactively deliver new/changed data from the server to the browser, they parse Mongo logs. There were attempts to do the same for SQL databases, but were unsuccessful. As a result, meet their new Apollo project, which is on top of GraphQL and is not tied to a specific backend implementation www.apollostack.comAnd what will happen to the good old DDP now?
6. Your Meteor app can be packaged into a Cordova mobile app with one command - looks cool, but now is the time for ReactNative and here we are reading discussions on the forums that it is possible that they will integrate with ReactNative, but when?
To sum up: the guys at MDG raised a lot of money and wanted to do everything themselves: their packages, their assembly, their template engine, their reactive protocol (DDP) and make everything work out of the box. And they did it!
Only it turned out that no one needed it, because. for packages, everyone sits on npm, the build must be flexible (and therefore we have gulp and webpack), the most fashionable templating engine today is React, the GraphQL reactive protocol and bases on the server, people like different things, not just MongoDb. And Meteor, in fact, remained on the sidelines of the entire ecosystem and movement around JavaScript. Realizing this, MDG began to move towards the JS community and the first step was taken: Meteor 1.3 supports normal ES2015 modules, npm packages, rendering through React and Angular. But the Meteor 1.3 is a bunch of crutches on top of the old bike Meteor. Read their plans for the future on the official blog, at least in this post: info.meteor.com/blog/announcing-meteor-1.3They basically have to rewrite it all over again! And the first sign of such "rewriting" is the separation of the Apollo project.
Perhaps on the second try they will do everything right and Meteor 2.0 will really shoot. Unless they run out of money first.
Now you can take Meteor and earn effectively on small / medium freelance projects when you need to do it quickly and not think about long-term support.
If you are making a big product, then you are in for big upheavals and changes in the Meteor ecosystem.

Answer 2

An experienced developer can deal with Meteor in a few days. Not very experienced (like me) - in two weeks. The time is not very long to master the technology (which is very likely to be liked). Try.

Answer 3

Developing, and how! I can't even keep track of everything. If earlier there was a blaze template engine, now all guidelines recommend react. It became possible to install packages from npm, previously it was only possible from the atmosphere. In fact, now a lot of things have been invented for the meteor, a lot of packages that do the same thing, a lot of routers, there is plenty to choose from. I've been with meteor for about a year, during which time the framework has undergone a huge number of innovations. In general, if you want to be in trend - take it. From my own experience, I can say that you can’t write a decent project in a week, a prototype, yes, but something for production is unlikely.