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Comment by netvarun | Hacker News Reader

I am pretty curious on how they are going to compete against other open source 'realtime web' solutions such as derby.js?

Especially since derby.js is distributed with npm and can be used in conjunction with the thousands of existing node.js libraries. Any node developer can integrate derby.js into his existing web app with a little effort and make it 'realtime'. With meteor, not so easily.

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Not everyone who can run a node.js server wants to (raises hand).

Think about Mailgun: obviously I'm capable of running a mail server and parsing incoming mail. But they can do it better, at a price that's cheaper than my time, and give me high availability without my paying a sysadmin.

Its an easy sell.

I don't think that's a stellar analogy. Email is a very ancillary part of a web service's business while the data management, analytics, business logic, etc are the very core.

I used both and it seems you're right that staying within the node.js+npm ecosystem is hugely beneficial. I can treat my derby project just like any other node.js project which have made it much easier to push to platforms like Heroku... It was also a lot easier to get a REST API going with derby since it's so close to express and connect whereas I feel like meteor mostly hides the interfaces to node.js packages it uses

How much effort is "little effort", in dollars?

My point is that it will take lesser resources (that includes time, HR and yes of course, $$) to use derby.js instead of meteor due to the former being part of the well-established node ecosytem.

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