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wsvincent

I'm currently using Meteor to teach a college-level course on Web Development for beginners.

https://csci16.hellometeor.com/

It's incredible how accessible Meteor is for this purpose:

* One line complete local setup

* One line deployment (to Meteor servers, but still)

* Javascript only (no need to learn Python, Ruby, etc in addition)

* Out of the box User Accounts

* Simple templating engine with Blaze

I can think of no other framework/language combo where true beginners can deploy a live, database-driven website in a couple of hours. I really wish Meteor could focus more on this aspect: becoming THE entry-level framework for learning web development.

However Meteor's business model is around hosting, so it's inevitable they move further and further towards the needs of professional, rather than entry-level, developers. And this takes them further into the areas outlined in this article where they are currently weak.

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I'm biased as the co-teacher, but I've been hugely impressed by progress our students have made in just three weeks. Meteor really does fit in well to the beginner curriculum.

Looking at the course page, it does indeed look like meteor is a good fit; it appears that if the course was from the late 90s it would be 2 parts html, 1 part css and 1 part cgi.

But for a little higher level I always liked web2py[1] - it always felt like they managed to balance bundling/simplicity with proper documentation that build confidence in what is (and is not) included: like having a db schema accompanying the section on built-in auth[2].

But it certainly fails the test of "just one language". And it appears their chosen host (pythonanywhere) need to fresh up their SNI/SSL handling.

[1] http://www.web2py.com

[2] http://web2py.com/books/default/chapter/29/09/access-control

I like web2py too though there don't seem to be too many people using it. Comparing to things like Meteor and Rails it's striking how it's remained backward compatible and much the same since it was launched 8 years ago.

I always ask myself in these cases, what do you mean by "progress"?

I've taught using Meteor as well, and I agree that it's incredibly wonderful for getting a real, live, modern web app off the ground in minutes. I plan to do more workshops with Meteor.

However, I wonder about what exactly beginner students are learning. It's important to illustrate foundational concepts, and Meteor's foundational concepts are quite different in some places: no traditional CRUD API, but rather an entirely new protocol (DDP) for automagically syncing databases. It's wonderful for prototyping but is something of a black box unless you're really going to dive deep.

My current philosophy is to teach Meteor as a rapid prototyping tool, for which it absolutely excels, where the audience is actual more on the product designer end but with nontrivial javascript experience. When I taught an absolute beginner's workshop, I realized (as others have said here) that the complexity level really does ramp up rapidly.

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