Where are the Meteor.js users? | Hacker News Reader

Where are the Meteor.js users?

weuse.meteor.com

28 pointsgrigio14 comments

A classic example of a page that completely doesn't need to be running under Meteor.

>Where are the Meteor.js users?

Probably sat somewhere in front of a 'loading' screen.

I think this is one of the big problems with current day web development: everyone thinks they need to use big, fancy JavaScript frameworks to make these rich one-page apps, when most of the time, you'd get the same thing with a standard Rails/Django app with a little JavaScript sprinkled in for interactivity. (And you'd skip the loading screen and all the other issues with frontend-heavy apps.)

EDIT: Uh, I didn't notice "set me here" button (and, strangely, it doesn't seem to work for me, even though I've enabled all scripts - clicking doesn't do anything) when I wrote the original comment. If the site has a function for users to add themselves, then Rails/Django is indeed necessary. Sorry, I've should've looked more carefully.

Old comment below:

Rails? Django? The data may be frequently updated but is still static - you really don't want to fire any heavy machinery on every request.

This begs for a static HTML page (with a some amount of JS that shows Google Maps and filters the list). And a daemon or crontab entry (depending whenever it's based on streaming or polling model) that updates it, and, possibly, busts the caches.

Well, I think they mean that the Rails/Django part would be useful for helping in the flow of persisting the new entries. If it's a static HTML page, people won't be able to add themselves which is the entire point of the site.

You can do anything in Rails/Django and some "sprinkled" JavaScript! The question is how many lines of code it will take you. The whole premise of Meteor is to give developers some fairly powerful features (reactivity, latency compensation, realtime syncing) with minimal lines of code. You can write these things with any other frameworks (or wire together libraries): the problem is in the writing/wiring part.

You're also ignoring the fact that Meteor has only been around for something like 2 years? Rails has been around for 9! Don't make the mistake of conflating inherent problem with problems that can be mitigated with more work. To give you an example, server-side rendering is on the roadmap for Meteor.

Let's also ignore for a moment that "sprinkled" JavaScript is just euphemism for writing your own little scripts with jQuery and praying they don't need to be expanded to do more things.

My CPU pegged and Chrome was unresponsive for about five seconds while the page loaded. If they're trying to attract users, that didn't help to win me over.

"weuse.meteor.com" is not an optimised app because a lot of data (you probably won't ever see) is sent to the client.

Of course optimizations are possible, but I wanted to keep it simple and show "everyone" on a map

I used Meteor for 3 days. It was a nice experience at first because I was beginning web development. It wasn't long until I was annoyed by tha fact that Meteor hides so much from me. Picking my own components and putting them together was much better for learning how to write an app (which I'm still doing).

I used Meteor for a recent project, which was a multiplayer game served up on a mobile device via kiosk at a conference. It was the perfect tool for the job, and I enjoyed working within the environment alot.

So with my next project I was looking for any excuse I could find to use Meteor.js again. It is a portfolio-ish site with a rich admin interface. But I just couldn't live with the upfront load time and didn't want to inflict that on my client, no matter how nice the developer experience.

Well I was thinking of using Meteor, but apparently Australia and New Zealand aren't covered.

If the rest of Meteor's design is as bad as that map, then I guess that explains there's only a couple of hundred users.

I would say I'm insulted, but it'd be more accurate to say I'm shaking my head in bemusement at the idiocy.

I'm not sure if this is what you mean, http://i.imgur.com/ZPiU1sY.png ???

On my laptop display the map gets truncated to exclude the bottom half of the world, including where I live.

Well, that took about thirty seconds to load. I know nothing about Meteor but this is not a good example of a web site, so I assume it isn't a great example of Meteor.js either. Does it have caching capabilities?

In the spreadsheets of the meteor marketing staff :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com