

Meteor 0.6.5: namespacing, modularity, new build system, source maps - debergalis
http://www.meteor.com/blog/2013/08/14/meteor-065-namespacing-modularity-new-build-system-source-maps

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recuter
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?

~~~
aioprisan
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](http://atmosphere.meteor.com) IMHO the 0.5.0
release could have been a 1.0, after auth and package support matured a bit.

~~~
recuter
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.

~~~
aioprisan
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.

~~~
akbar501
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.

------
fingerprinter
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?

~~~
zzimmer
Geoff Schmidt - a founder of Meteor - wrote an essay explaining the reasoning
behind meteor packages:
[https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/516#issuecomment-12919...](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/516#issuecomment-12919473)

BTW - You can use NPM packages within Meteor packages.

~~~
qiqing
+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...](http://www.meteor.com/blog/2013/04/04/meteor-060-brand-new-
distribution-system-app-packages-npm-integration)

------
graue
I've been a little more impressed with Derby
([http://derbyjs.com/](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?

~~~
yefim
I've written a good number of Meteor sites/packages (including
[https://atmosphere.meteor.com/package/z-mongo-
admin](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.

------
moneyrich2
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?

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

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

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

~~~
glasser
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.)

