
Meteor 1.1 Released – Now Supporting Microsoft Windows and MongoDB 3.0 - foldor
https://www.meteor.com/blog/2015/03/31/meteor-11-microsoft-windows-mongodb-30
======
DigitalSea
I think I might give Meteor a shot. For a long time I have been working with
AngularJS and Node.js. Recently I have been working exclusively with React.js
+ Flux and Node.js to build isomorphic web applications. I like the fact
Meteor is isomorphic by default and comes with everything you need. I have
always somewhat seen it as this outlier, a great looking framework but lacking
the same vocality that Facebook and Google can give their respective libraries
and frameworks.

Even seeing Meteor from a prototyping perspective it looks like a great tool.
The integration with MongoDB (3.0 is fantastic by the way) and ability to
quickly create and work with collections from within your Meteor applications
without really needing to glue anything together or configure is something
that appeals to me (especially as a front-end developer who is asked to
prototype things quite a lot). Coupled with the support for authentication,
user accounts and easy deployment, these are definitely key features to a
modern web application.

Windows support is definitely an added bonus, especially for me who switches
between a MacBook Pro and a PC for .NET development.

~~~
andrewfong
If you get lost at any point, I highly recommend
[https://www.discovermeteor.com/](https://www.discovermeteor.com/). Definitely
much useful than the official documentation if you're looking for any sort of
tutorial.

~~~
akshatpradhan
Why aren't these great books turned into the official documentation if the
current official docs are lacking in so much quality?

~~~
TylerE
Because that sort of "consulting economy" is the open source business model de
jure.

~~~
petercooper
It's not really new, except perhaps it being more indie now. In most (but not
all) niches over the years, the paid, formal published for-profit books have
provided the best documentation, right back to the 70s, through O'Reilly's
catalogue (he got rich for a reason), through MSDN, and right up to now.
Indeed, it's possibly better now because a single author can do it all on
their own.

------
sebastianconcpt
Meteor is great, I can't create a web app with other stacks faster than with
Meteor.

My record was saving the day with a demo in less than 1 hour.

I'm glad is more mature.

The only thing I miss is Postgres as alternative to MongoDB.

Mongo is really comfortable but some projects needs Postgres badassness.

Should be doable for Meteor's team since Postgres is now super friendly to
JSON. I guess the main challenge is in the SQL support because is a beast in
itself. But starting small with a MiniSQL API at the frontend would be totally
fine.

~~~
lordbusiness
+1 vote for a relational alternative. I am a fan of NoSQL, and I am a fan of
Mongo, but I'd love to have the power of Meteor with a relational backend too.

------
quackware
Meteor and bootstrap combined have made it awesome to prototype new ideas.
Everything is very smooth and as a beginner web developer I'm not banging my
head against the wall writing large amounts of code to link various frameworks
together.

A few hours a day for a week have already generated real progress with a
startup idea, which would have taken me weeks using angular/express/mongo/node
separately. As someone with a full time job who is trying to work on side
projects in my free time after work, it's really nice to see progress every
night and definitely motivates me to keep going.

Keep it up!

~~~
mmikeff
Is the real time nature of Meteor important to your product?

I ask because I'm considering trying Meteor to prototype some ideas none of
which particularly need real-time data updates in the client.

Would I be better off with some alternative framework or is meteor still super
quick to pick up and get stuff done for 'regular' web apps? Being able to
knock an idea out quickly vastly outweighs any kind of scalability concerns
and most performance concerns.

(Bearing in mind that I am familiar with JS and Android development, free time
for noodling on personal projects is in very short supply and not got the time
to learn a totally new language)

~~~
subpixel
That's a good question. I've been learning and using Meteor for a few months
and my projects do not require reactivity at their core.

Meteor is built around reactivity, and there is some overhead built in to the
platform to make it possible, but it's pretty easy to design things so your
app isn't overloaded by trying to "real time all the things".

The simplest step is to structure publications so as to deliver the least
amount of reactive data needed at each step of the user experience. Another
important approach is to understand what forces re-computations and re-
renderings and try to minimize them when you can.

It's also possible to serve non-reactive data (meteor-dumb-collections) and
obviate many performance concerns related to reactivity.

The speed and relative ease of working with Meteor makes this approach well
worth it to me.

Also worth noting is that many of the production apps built with Meteor are
not billed as a "real time solution to x". I suspect they have also spent a
good amount of time designing around reactivity so they only take advantage of
it where it's useful.

~~~
mmikeff
Thnx, good suggestions

------
asenna
I recently started a moderately large project in Meteor and I must say,
although I was a little apprehensive at the start, I am truly amazed at how
far Meteor has come.

Built-in reactivity, latency-compensation and the lot makes development really
fun. It feels like a mature platform, the community is growing and is
extremely helpful. I would recommend anyone who is still wondering, to just
try to build an app or two with it and you will know what I am talking about.

PS. If you are in the Bay Area, they have Dev Shops at their HQ in SF every
4th Thursday: [http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-
SFBay/events/221409952/](http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-SFBay/events/221409952/)

~~~
primigenus
If you're in the Bay Area but not in SF, we also have the South Bay meetup
(that I run): [http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-South-
Bay/](http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-South-Bay/)

------
ryannevius
Rapid prototyping is all fine and dandy...but what happens if my idea actually
does gain traction? This is the part that makes me uneasy about Meteor. It
sounds like I'm either going to have to rewrite everything completely, or wait
until Meteor matures, if I need to scale.

~~~
sergiotapia
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18083835/how-many-
concurr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18083835/how-many-concurrent-
users-can-a-web-app-built-in-meteor-js-handle)

2500 subscriptions per minutes on a shitty $5 digital ocean droplet (in 2013).
Don't put the cart before the horse, 99.99% of applications don't reach even
100 concurrent users on a regular basis.

~~~
comp1927
exactly for big cakephp site...wordpress maybe

------
DeBraid
Been working with Meteor for over a year and loved every minute. Meteor solves
the biggest problems facing modern app development: one-language/code base/API
for web and mobile, syncing data between client and server, free simple
hosting. My intro to Meteor slides have links, etc
[http://fsto.meteor.com/#/4/5](http://fsto.meteor.com/#/4/5) and I fast-
forwarded to GIF that perfectly captures how stoked I was after building a few
apps.

------
josh2600
I made a snapshot on Terminal.com which lets you try Meteor 1.1 in seconds.
Check it out here:
[https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/be98f98eece7e102bab130b91d...](https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/be98f98eece7e102bab130b91d2388c0aaa54e7c4344d90e7379a1cbab741483)

This boots a CentOS 6 box running Meteor 1.1. It's also running on Terminal so
you can snapshot your progress anytime you want (or resize to a bigger machine
without rebooting too).

~~~
sanderjd
How do I navigate to `my_cool_app`? Do I need to change the apache
configuration, or symlink into `/var/www/html`, or what?

~~~
freebs
If you go back it's in /root

~~~
sanderjd
Yes, but how do I open it in a browser? Browsing to `localhost:80` obviously
only goes to the pre-configured default page from apache.

------
callmeed
I'm curious what startups or big companies are using Meteor in production

~~~
gaplus
My custom packaging startup Packlane
([http://packlane.com](http://packlane.com)) uses Meteor. Really grateful for
this update since the old Mongo version had some major issues.

~~~
primigenus
The reason your site is taking long to load is because you have multiple >1MB
assets. Open up the Chrome inspector and look at the network tab. You're
loading 7.7MB, 7.3MB of which are images. There are two gifs that are over 2MB
in size. You should reduce the size of them to 200KB at most, and also
consider delaying loading images that are below the initial viewport until the
user needs to see them. I also recommend compressing all of your jpg's and
using a tool like ImageOptim to strip out any extraneous data.

~~~
gaplus
Just deployed a new version of the app with optimized images. Thanks so much
for the thorough, constructive feedback.

------
borgia
I used Meteor a number of times a few years ago and was totally blown away by
it. Utterly fantastic.

Then went down the route of working in enterprise java for a few years and
now, trying to get into full stack javascript based development, I feel
totally swamped.

~~~
rglover
What are you getting hung up on the most?

~~~
borgia
I've been wanting to get into nodejs but haven't touched javascript in years
and have been put off by the hassle of having to go through it again tbh.

~~~
jdhawk
So much easier when these frameworks are new and light, and the underlying
languages are not changing at light speed...I'm with you.

------
scoj
As a .NET developer, I've been looking forward to official Windows support for
a long time. I am installing it now!

I'm hoping with better VS support for Node.js, there will be more MS shops
playing around with Meteor and Node.

------
bunkydoo
I've been working with meteor since 0.6.3 and I have had only great
experiences with it. I've been going to the meetups in my area which has
brought me together with a great community of developers from all sorts of
backgrounds - and even connected me with people from across the world via
webcast. Nothing but good vibes and support in this community. I saw someone
commented with the Discover Meteor book link, and that is the perfect place to
start - you need literally zero coding experience to build a production
quality app within an afternoon. Also be sure to check out the Telescope
project ([http://www.telescopeapp.org/](http://www.telescopeapp.org/)) put
together by one of the co-authors, Sacha Grief - a designer out of Osaka. He
is seriously one of the most dedicated, helpful people out there when it comes
to Meteor and I can guarantee if you email him he will respond with help :)

~~~
primigenus
Can I ask which meetup you've been attending? We (the organizers of such
meetups) would love to hear where you're having a great time!

------
tomcam
Responsive SQL, please!

~~~
bmajz
Definitely my biggest current beef with Meteor. It seems technically possible
and I understand why they would go with Mongo first, so hopefully its just a
matter of time.

~~~
maxharris
Ben (the guy in the video) is working on SQL support!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJzulpXZn6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJzulpXZn6g)

Here's a follow-up talk he did:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSI68J9wNJ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSI68J9wNJ0)

Also, there's prototype-grade support for Redis:

[https://github.com/meteor/redis-livedata](https://github.com/meteor/redis-
livedata)

And that's just the beginning. There are lots more databases that will follow:
[https://www.meteor.com/full-stack-db-drivers](https://www.meteor.com/full-
stack-db-drivers)

~~~
Tarang
This looks good with the videos. I'm contemplating building an app that
requires SQL. I've built a few apps with meteor but mongo's lock keeps
crashing my website down.

The current third party packages with SQL support are very experimental and
don't support nearly as much as the native mongo driver.

I assume when Meteor does this or if Arunoda does it would be pretty awesome.
Especially with PostgreSQL since it supports native live queries.

------
the_rosentotter
I get an astroturfing vibe from Meteor. Coming from the consulting world, I
have seen this too many times from entities with vested commercial interests.
For this reason I always withhold any opinion until real world experience
checks in from someone trusted.

~~~
gooseus
Absolutely, I made a comment making a similar point when they hit 1.0

The Meteor marketing team seems to want to entrench themselves in every naive
tech company they can and I can't believe that there could be so many Meteor
users here with enough experience to comment so stridently on it.

My experience with Meteor was that my current company hired someone (who
is/was literally writing a book on Meteor) to be the lead dev and they built a
whole dashboard application in Meteor.

I arrived 6 months later and began working with them on that application and
another Express app that they flat-out refused to touch.

I found that though Meteor was easy to pickup and figure out at a surface
level, that it got very complex very fast when you started down the path of
making a large application with lots of moving parts. Performance was terrible
and there were always strange quirks and assumptions that Meteor would make
that needed to be worked around later (one instance was their use of random
string _ids in mongo which weren't valid ObjectIds).

Meteor tries to do everything for you and when you want to do something
different, you have to go find some esoteric knowledge to hack around some
core architecture or pattern. They don't play well with others and any
questions or criticisms I had for this Meteor evangelist usually resulted in
abstract arguments that boiled down to me needing to change my entire way of
thinking about web apps to work with it effectively.

One of my arguments was "hey, where are all the other meteor devs? what
happens if you leave or get hit by a bus?" which was also deflected somehow or
made to sound ridiculous...

4 months later they leave to start their own consulting company and try to get
themselves hired as an outside consultant for whatever rate.

I rewrote the entire application with a MEAN stack in 6 weeks with more
features, better performance and a decoupled architecture and we've never
looked back.

Admiral Ackbar would recognize Meteor for what it truly is... but unless
you've got a Jedi or 2 on your team you'll want to be double and triple
checking your needs before moving forward with Meteor.

</dissent>

~~~
primigenus
Sorry you had a bad experience with the developer.

However, there is no such thing as the "Meteor marketing team". Meteor doesn't
employ any marketing people (yet). Anyone talking enthusiastically about
Meteor is just genuinely excited about it.

I'm curious to hear specific examples of esoteric concepts that you had a
tough time with. In my experience, Meteor is the opposite of esoteric and
actually very easy to work with, even as application complexity increases. If
you can outline your issues, maybe we can try to address them. Thanks!

~~~
gooseus
I didn't have a bad experience with the developer so much as my company did.
They paid the person for a years worth of development that was scrapped
because it was in an esoteric framework.

DDP is an esoteric concept, the idea of mini-mongo is an esoteric concept. And
the tough time I had with them was in understanding why it was important for
our application and how I was supposed to accomplish certain things within the
construct.

Here's another example, we had the need to allow users to upload a zipped
folder of web content which would then be unzipped to a location on the file
system that was acting as our "cdn" until that location was an actual CDN.

Everything about accomplishing this was an enormous headache because it had to
be done the "meteor-way" and it wasn't even a dogmatic thing (like some people
are about the "angular way")... we literally had to do everything the Meteor
way because it's isomorphic and you can't isolate anything outside of it
without tremendous pain.

Another example of Meteor problems? How about when it upgraded to 0.9 and I
couldn't run `meteor --version` without it trying to automagically upgrade to
0.9, which was a version that broke all a bunch of the 3rd party meteor
plugins we were dependent on. We had to essentially just pray that our
production application didn't spontaneously upgrade itself and embarrass our
company during a fund-raising round.

You can apologize all you want and blame whatever on this particular dev
and/or a naive implementation; but the truth is that Meteor over extends
itself with its blatant self promotion and cares more about getting
entrenching itself in the startup/web-development zeitgeist and than it does
on actually being a useful tool.

------
primigenus
If you're just learning about Meteor or haven't really checked it out yet, I
recommend reading the mission page:
[https://www.meteor.com/about](https://www.meteor.com/about) \- not only is it
inspiring, but it helps frame what they're shooting for. The first paragraph:

"Writing software is too hard and it takes too long. It's time for a new way
to write software — especially application software, the user-facing software
we use every day to talk to people and keep track of things."

------
ziggrat
Meteor is great i used it to prototype the live section of
www.sportskeeda.com. Then i had to switch to jquery polling to make it faster.
Meteor was fast except for the initial load that used to take a couple of
extra seconds. This was reduced to large extent on Modulus.

So my suggestion to anyone considering Meteor in production is to deploy on
Modulus.

------
jtchang
What does support for sql databases look like with meteor? Is it stable and
supported enough to use postgres?

~~~
aikah
It only support Mongodb because it is built on a specific mongodb feature.
Basically, if you update Mongodb outside meteor, meteor can track that change.

------
lloydde
I took a look at Meteor pre-1.0 and definitely plan to revisit. I just checked
to see if "Mongo package fails to report closure of inactive cursors." [1] is
marked resolved. I may be misremembering the issue, but it seemed like a bug
with a smell. The sort of subtle bug that might measure the water level, one
that could be hard to debug for a beginner if encountered in the wild and one
that is essential to have fixed for production apps.

1\.
[https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/2792](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/2792)

------
neumino
When will RethinkDB be supported? :-)

~~~
imslavko
Michel, I thought you were playing with this idea? ;)

------
charif
Great! Curious about MongoDB 3.0 and WiredTiger storage engine performance in
my meteor apps. Also curious how it performs in comparison with PostgreSQL.

------
JDDunn9
Has anyone used MEAN and Meteor? What are the benefits of one over the other?

~~~
primigenus
Read this:
[http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/meteor_js_vs_the_mean_s...](http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/meteor_js_vs_the_mean_stack)

------
xyproto
They have forgot to think about deployment. Creating a package for Meteor, for
a Linux distro, is a major pain in the ass and discouraged by the Meteor
developers.

------
comp1927
Trello user voice converted to realease !!

------
curiously
here's my question for those building their 'app' 'startup' with meteor.js

what does it accomplish for you that normal server rendered framework doesn't
do for you?

when you build a meteor.js app you need phantomjs to get it indexed...it won't
work on older browsers....the list goes on

I just have trouble justifying why I would need to write my next app using
meteor.js

~~~
primigenus
It accomplishes many things that other frameworks don't, the most important of
which are ease of use and dramatic productivity gains. I recommend reading
meteor.com/about for a high level overview and then diving into the
description of projects at meteor.com/projects to understand how the various
components of Meteor function. The original screencast at
meteor.com/screencast is also a very useful introduction, and if you want to
spend about half an hour building an app to get the basics down,
meteor.com/try will do just that.

Using phantomjs to index your site has not caused any problems for most of us
building apps in production for the past two years. From an engineering
standpoint there are better alternatives such as server-side rendering (btw,
there is a Meteor package that does this:
[https://github.com/meteorhacks/meteor-
ssr](https://github.com/meteorhacks/meteor-ssr)), so outside of performance
considerations this isn't a super big deal. A lot of Meteor apps also aren't
Google-facing but instead apps that you use after log in, where Meteor's
advantages have the biggest effect on one's productivity.

Meteor works in every evergreen browser and quite a few older ones. It will
fall back to polling if there is no support for websockets and the Blaze view
library works in IE8+.

I recommend just trying it out. It takes no time to install and get your first
app started (<1 min) and you will immediately start to see the benefits. Come
tell us more about your situation at forums.meteor.com and maybe we can help!

------
curiously
my gripes with meteor are:

not sure how ddp works or how to scale a meteor app. does not work with
postgresql or any other db.

The biggest issue for me is the tight coupling to MongoDB.

Background: we used Meteor back in mid 2013. we ended up wasting a lot of time
and resources because we had to learn everything. when we did, it did not
perform so well, over 1MB going back and forth for what could've been achieved
with a simple LAMP or ROR app. I think they've dropped Meteor completely.

Anyways, the windows support is nice. Might give it another go now. Not sure
what the deal is with MongoDB 3.0. I've been using postgresql entirely now.

~~~
primigenus
DDP is very simple. Think of it like REST for websockets. Here is the project
page: [https://www.meteor.com/ddp](https://www.meteor.com/ddp) and here is the
spec:
[https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/ddp/DDP...](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/ddp/DDP.md).
If you have any questions, post them on forums.meteor.com and we'll try to
help you out.

It's not "tightly coupled" to MongoDB; Mongo is simply the only database that
livequery
([https://www.meteor.com/livequery](https://www.meteor.com/livequery)) has
implemented support for at the moment. There are community projects for MySQL
and PostgreSQL, as well as partially complete drivers for Redis and Elastic.
Official (My)SQL support is on the roadmap and will probably appear later this
year.

~~~
curiously
any dates on when you might see that happening? postgresql support would be a
massive game breaker move.

~~~
maxharris
I am really excited about Ben Green's work on mysql and postgresql support in
Meteor!

(Check out my other posts on this page for links to Ben's talks about this
work.)

[https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql](https://github.com/numtel/meteor-
mysql) [https://github.com/nothingisdead/pg-live-
query](https://github.com/nothingisdead/pg-live-query)

