

Show HN: Respondly – Team Inbox for Email and Twitter. Our new MeteorJS App - timhaines
https://respond.ly

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halisaurus
Looks awesome! Is there a reason you chose Meteor over other options? Was
there some key functionality or development requirement that made Meteor the
obvious (or only) choice?

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philcockfield
Thanks for taking a look, and the kind words.

Here was the design criteria we were holding in mind when deciding on the
technical stack to employ for Respondly. To support the "team collaboration"
story we knew it was going to be a heavily JS based "native like" UI
experience. So basically a rich single-page app that used push-state and web-
sockets a lot.

Meteor is nice in that it folds a number of technologies into the stack that
when combined are extremely powerful, not least of which being Mongo on the
server AND the client, which helps a lot in reducing the amount of code you
typically have to write for dealing with invalidating shared data when it
changes between users. It achieves this by having the Mongo API replicated on
the client in JS, which is really a thin proxy to the DB on the server. So
your coding against Mongo as though it were actually in the browser, and
Meteor handles the data syncing in the background. It sounds a little magical,
but it shakes out to be a really helpful abstraction to sit behind.

The real kicker for us, though, is that we can lean on the hard-core
architectural work MeteorDG has done to ensure a real-time, web-sockets based
system of this kind can scale readily when there are ton of connected clients.

By avoiding rolling that sort of architectural plumbing ourselves we've been
able to focus more on the feature set.

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kfd1
would love to have a technical blog post on testing, code structure, etc. good
work - looks great.

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timhaines
Thanks for the kind words. We really should get a technical blog going - we've
learnt a lot about MeteorJS over the last year.

