

Meteor 0.6.0: brand new distribution system, app packages, NPM integration - JanLaussmann
http://meteor.com/blog/2013/04/04/meteor-060-brand-new-distribution-system-app-packages-npm-integration

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jongold
This is good news - the momentum of the Meteor community & of dev efforts is
really infectious.

Probably not ready to be building 100 million user services on just yet, but
utterly fantastic for quick prototyping & iterating services (which is a large
part of what I do day-to-day).

I love Backbone & Ember and all the rest, but as mainly-a-designer/front-end-
dev, if I can get away without writing an API in Rails and have everything
_just work_ I'll choose that any day.

I've also got this idea of a scale of 'magicness' from 0-10.

\- 0 - writing the JS by hand, maybe with jQuery.ajax etc.

\- 2 - Backbone - easy to use, easy to debug — just not very magical!

\- 5 - Ember & Angular - pretty cool but still enough that the headaches can
be off-putting

\- 9 - Meteor - always seems to work, never frustrating, so magic that the
occasional thing that's tricky to implement is totally worth the rewards.

edit: also, shameless plug - if you're in London and like tech meetups that
aren't boring, come to the Meteor meetup. It's fun.

~~~
jjsz
Is there anyway to bet a brunch / angular skeleton to maybe a 7, close to
something like meteor without being tied down to their ecosystem?

~~~
firefoxman1
I think Derby and SocketStream might sit at the 7-8 spot.

~~~
jjsz
You're right the html attribute approach goes with angularjs (source:
[http://blog.derbyjs.com/2012/04/14/our-take-on-derby-vs-
mete...](http://blog.derbyjs.com/2012/04/14/our-take-on-derby-vs-meteor/)).

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kennu
Is Meteor winning now? Commit activity of Derby.js (and Racer) seem really
low. I already switched once from Meteor to Derby for more flexibility (npm
packages, server-side express routes, etc.). But I'm wondering if Meteor now
has more momentum.

~~~
nateps
We are still actively developing Derby and Racer. We are currently working on
a re-write of Racer's internals on top of ShareJS that will make Derby useable
for a production app. See: [http://blog.derbyjs.com/2013/03/26/getting-derby-
ready-for-p...](http://blog.derbyjs.com/2013/03/26/getting-derby-ready-for-
prime-time/)

Our initial goal in open sourcing the framework was to get some ideas out
there and see what worked well and what didn't. We've learned a lot from this
process, and we now have a much better idea of how to build a great system.

We are excited to see all of the innovation coming from Meteor, Firebase, and
other new realtime systems. While there are similarities, our teams have
different perspectives on what the future of web development looks like, and
we believe there is still a great deal to be gained from further development
of each of these platforms.

Currently, our changes to Racer will keep a similar API but make Derby apps
much more stable and scalable to large production deployments.

~~~
kennu
I'm very happy that there are several active open source projects to choose
from. I get a similar impression of Meteor vs. Derby as I get from Rails vs.
Django.

(To me, their difference is about productivity vs. flexibility, although IMHO
Rails eventually became just as flexible and "won". So it's interesting to see
if Meteor achieves the same.)

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AlexeyMK
[Shameless plug:] I'm giving an intro to meteor talk at Stanford tomorrow
(Friday) at 5PM, in the Engineering (Huang) basement/hackerspace
<https://www.facebook.com/events/476872052366365/>.

I'm planning to build a real-time multiplayer javascript game from scratch,
taking suggestions from the audience as we go. If you've been curious about
Meteor and are in the area, come by!

~~~
thealphanerd
Rats... I'll be busy prepping for a concert in sf this weekend
<https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/modulations/>

Are you Stanford Student? Will you be giving other talks on campus? Any links
to the hackerspace?

~~~
AlexeyMK
I'm a recent Penn alumnus, but I live in the area.

The hackerspace: <http://svihackspace.com/>

If you're curious about making it out to a Meteor event in the area, check out
the Meetup.com group: <http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-SFBay/>

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stuffihavemade
So, does this mean meteorite (<http://oortcloud.github.com/meteorite/>) is now
obsolete?

~~~
wavesounds
If you wanted to implement a package that uses something Meteor specific (aka
another Meteor package like Meteor.Accounts) you would still want to create a
meteorite/atmosphere package instead of a node package right?

~~~
lgray
I think so. NPM packages are only supposed to rely on node and other NPM
packages. Meteorite packages also rely on Meteor, which isn't an NPM package.

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glesperance
> We've added file-level JavaScript variable scoping. Variables declared with
> `var` at the outermost level of a JavaScript source file are now private to
> that file. Remove the `var` to share a value between files.

I think it is convenient to be able to declare global variables like that but
perhaps there should be a way to monitor those ; in other words, it would be
really convenient to have some form of alert system to notify you when a new
global variable is created.

That way, globals created by mistakenly forgetting the 'var' keyword would be
easily spotted.

~~~
glasser
This is under active development on the linker branch:
<https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/linker> ! The goal, hopefully coming in
one of the next few releases, is to provide package-scoped variables and
explicit exports from packages, so that you don't need to rely on globals at
all any more.

~~~
bmcmahen
I'm happy to hear this. One of the primary problems with client-side
development right now is the lack of commonjs style imports and exports --
something which people are trying to solve using component, etc. It'd be nice
if Meteor had something baked in.

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rglover
I've recently fallen head over heels for Meteor.

When it was first announced, I was fairly intrigued like everyone else and
gave it a spin. At the time, I found it difficult to put the pieces together.
Now, that's all changed.

Great example: I'm wiring up an accounts system in an app now and excluding
styles, it will take about 5-10 minutes to write the auth code. Fully
functioning and even ready to support popular third-party services.

The best part: they haven't even hit _1.0_.

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jordanlev
Congrats on the release. Randome side-question... when I visit meteor.com with
cookies disabled, there is no content displayed (just the background image) --
is this indicative of meteor.js not functioning without cookies enabled, or is
this just specific to how you've built your site?

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stesch
<noscript>This site uses JavaScript. You won't see any content without
it.</noscript>

~~~
jongold
Assuming you're trolling but worth pointing out that Meteor includes a
Spiderable package so it's indexable by search engines etc.

<http://meteor.com/blog/2012/08/09/search-engine-optimization>

~~~
1qaz2wsx3edc
Yes, but last time I checked it's exposed to DDoS's, as it uses a headless
browser, which is largely inefficient.

~~~
Cushman
Any site which serves dynamic content without a caching layer is exposed to
DDoS.

------
joezhou
Devshop 2 was awesome, some of the best engineers I've ever met!

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jasonparekh
Meteor's some really addicting stuff. The only regression for me with that
stack was losing some of Angular's really powerful client-side functionality.
I looked at a couple of the existing bridge options, but none really appealed.
I'm creating some nice glue, will put it up on Github once I can ensure it is
stable.

Result: get the best of both Angular and Meteor, with the ability to use
either (or both of their) reactivity.

