Meteor 0.6.5: namespacing, modularity, new build system, source maps | Hacker News Reader

Meteor 0.6.5: namespacing, modularity, new build system, source maps

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78 pointsdebergalis21 comments

This is a bit irrational, but it nags me every time the occasional Meteor post shows up here - it seems to always get a lot of upvotes and very few comments:

The Meteor blog goes back (under a different name) almost two years, that huge announcement thread is from 490 days ago, and they got VC funding over a year ago.

I remember being pretty excited at the time but somehow this long wait for a 1.0 has taken the wind out of my sails. I don't mean to diminish all their hard work, and to be fair, there are frequent signs of life, but somehow it no longer captures the imagination. Am I the only one?

What specifically doesn't capture your imagination? There is a very vibrant community behind meteor and lots of packages that to amazing things not included in the core meteor install itself at http://atmosphere.meteor.com IMHO the 0.5.0 release could have been a 1.0, after auth and package support matured a bit.

Unfortunately when you work from incomplete information you have to rely a bit on instincts and not totally rational feelings. Its just a vibe I got and I might be totally off base, so I had to sanity check here. (rglover made me feel a lot better about it) :)

I've been subscribed to the newsletter all along and notice interesting things here and there but somehow haven't gotten around to diving in yet because its a very crowded field.

There's a sort of continuum with Backbone and Angular/Ember or perhaps Node or Flask or more recently Go. Its easy to drown in all the choices, and as far as I know Meteor has no big websites/projects using it yet so it hasn't carved out a niche/identity in my mind yet.

I'm not sure that not having big sites come out and say that they're using Meteor is a huge detractor. In fact, many corporate products usually don't mention what platforms they're built on. At my previous company, we were using Meteor for a number of critical internal systems, which is where I picked it up from.

IMO, the reference to large volume sites that use a product is an indicator that it can be scaled. Not that scaling a given solution was easy, but more that it can be done.

I'm about a month away from releasing a production app, entirely written in Meteor.

Don't let the sub 1.0 diminish your interest. The framework (as well as the core dev team and community) continue to impress me. It's really well written and I think what's different about how they do things comes down to quality. When the dev team puts out a release, you can trust that 99% (if not all) of what they're releasing works, and works really well.

I'd much rather put my weight behind a team that paces themselves than rushes releases out the door just for press sake.

Stay tuned, it's just going to keep getting better.

As for upvotes and comments: I think it's because people are still excited about it, but cautious, I think most people are waiting for the big 1.0. That said, 0.6.4 is great, you can use it, it's stable, and it will allow you too express a lot with it.

This release is also a big one, in terms of internals.

0.6.4.1 -> 0.6.5 is a huge jump:

https://github.com/meteor/meteor/compare/release/0.6.4.1-rc3...

I think the fact that these guys are taking their time to reach 1.0 is a good thing. Too many projects rush the "production-ready" label, and inevitably people end up getting stuck with bad technology that burns them. The fact that a project is taking their time to get this done is a vote of confidence.

Also, you don't have to wait for 1.0. You can start using Meteor right now. Is there anything specific that you're waiting for?

I'm building a reactive issue tracker with Meteor. I've been very impressed with the framework, and with the community. I struggled with Angular and Ember for a while - just could not get their conceptual models to load in my head. Meteor is simple to understand, and that's really important if you need to build something quickly.

Can't wait to get 0.6.5 running tonight!

Hi, I'm currently writing a large Meteor app. I don't think you're being irrational at all, and I myself was under the impression Meteor would have hit v1 around a month ago. As it turns out, we're a long, long way off: https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap

I suspect that their 'galaxy' product is probably taking a lot of their time. Galaxy is their 'enterprise-grade, multi-tenant hosting environment for Meteor apps'. They are keeping it very hush hush at the moment.

I feel that Meteor is awesome and has quite a bit of potential, but why stray from npm, which is one of those things that is actually awesome about node? I really wish Meteor would use npm. Is there some technical reason they don't?

Geoff Schmidt - a founder of Meteor - wrote an essay explaining the reasoning behind meteor packages: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/516#issuecomment-12919...

BTW - You can use NPM packages within Meteor packages.

+1. And here's the relevant blog post about NPM integration in Meteor.

http://www.meteor.com/blog/2013/04/04/meteor-060-brand-new-d...

You can use NPM packages directly within the app too: http://meteorhacks.com/complete-npm-integration-for-meteor.h...

I've been a little more impressed with Derby (http://derbyjs.com/) than Meteor, as it's based on similar concepts, but plays well with the rest of the Node/JS ecosystem (for example, it uses npm), has server-side rendering of page content, and can scale to multiple servers.

I have to admit my only hands-on experience so far has been a little tinkering, though. Who's actually written stuff with Meteor, Derby and/or similar frameworks, and what were your thoughts?

I've written a good number of Meteor sites/packages (including https://atmosphere.meteor.com/package/z-mongo-admin) and I'm in love. For a personal project, I switched midway from Flask/Backbone to Meteor and rebuilt everything from scratch within a few hours. It was very eye-opening not to have to worry about concurrency, re-rendering, and page refreshes. Admittedly, I haven't played around with Derby nearly as much (only went through a few tutorials), but the community behind Meteor is amazing.

probably wrong to post this here, but did anyone actually chose slipstream over meteor (or meteor over another framework)? can you let us know why?

What is slipstream? The only thing I could find was a 3rd party package for Meteor: https://github.com/blitzcodes/slipstream-mrt

Awesome! I'm looking forward to using source maps.

Agreed. I wonder what the browser support looks like right now.

Our understanding of the current level of browser support is actually in a big comment at the beginning of every file aimed at the browser we generate that has a source map :)

    If you are using Chrome, open the Developer Tools and click the gear
    icon in its lower right corner. In the General Settings panel, turn
    on 'Enable source maps'.
    
    If you are using Firefox 23, go to `about:config` and set the
    `devtools.debugger.source-maps-enabled` preference to true.
    (The preference should be on by default in Firefox 24; versions
    older than 23 do not support source maps.)

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