17 ms·

Meteor in the Wild: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reactive Programming

63 points by belisarius222 14y ago

ams6110 14y ago
Might be a good idea to at least put <noscript>This page requires JavaScript</noscript> on your site. All I see an expanse of white.
- aroman 14y ago
  The last few lines of the article shed some light on OP's opinion of browsing with JavaScript disabled: "you need to support browsers that don't have JavaScript enabled. ... ok, that last one was sufficiently low-probability that I'll stop there before I start telling you not to use Meteor if your customers gave up their computers in favor of the abacus."
  - Volpe 14y ago
    I don't quite understand the whole "I cripple my browser" thing. Like, if you are going to disable javascript, why not CSS, and if you disable both of those... by not disable the renderer and just read the html... or demand people write plain text websites. Javascript seems rather arbitrary... But I do wonder about the accessibility ramifications of only supporting javascript. Do all browsers support javascript?
    - stavrianos 14y ago
      For a sufficiently lax definition of "browser", no. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#JavaScript_support http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Java...
    - Wilya 14y ago
      > why not CSS Disabling useless CSS stuff is pretty much what Readability is all about. Besides, CSS generally doesn't claim much of my CPU to display peripheral stuff. Javascript, on the other hand ...
- jacalata 14y ago
  I'm running a boilerplate firefox and on first load, I saw the same thing.
pqdbr 14y ago
I liked the article a lot, got excited about giving Meteor a go for our next project, but then I checked out your website and got bummed. It takes +10 seconds to load ... the "loading " message. And then it just sits there, spinning the jewish logo.
saint-loup 14y ago
I'm sorry, but why would you put something like this in your CSS: text-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,.5); It makes the text blurred and jarring.
- stavrianos 14y ago
  Perhaps an attempt to force/fake font smoothing?
belisarius222 14y ago
@saint-loup Good catch! That was old code, not noticeable in my usual browser. It's gone now.
paulyg 14y ago
"Coming soon on mobile. Check it out on your desktop or laptop." Really?
amadeus 14y ago
How can Meteor be taken seriously with shit like this? This site barely works... Simply hangs with spinning jewish logos...
- gfodor 14y ago
  This could be anything, and be completely unrelated to meteor or related in a way that has no bearing on the claims of the article. He did just launch, after all.
  - amadeus 14y ago
    I've had a couple of my sites hit by Hacker News before, it's not that much traffic. But I am perhaps a bit biased, I already think Meteor is a joke of a product.
    - gfodor 14y ago
      Most big things start out as jokes. (I don't hold an opinion one way or the other.) But you have to admit they are doing something semi-interesting.
      - amadeus 14y ago
        I prefer to be interested in things that are ACTUALLY interesting; think Google's Spanner, SpaceX, etc, developed by neckbeards who know what they are doing. Not some silly NodeJS/MongoDB API.
        gfodor 14y ago
        It's generally unkind to come in and trash other peoples' work, especially when it's work that is something designed to help make others' jobs easier and is being open sourced.
        faceyspacey 14y ago
jbm 14y ago
Can't access as my phone gets redirected to an empty mobile page.
primigenus 14y ago
I'm excited to try out your dating site given that it's built with Meteor and I'm a fan, but having to sign up three of my female friends to see it first is a buzz kill. Perhaps you could consider a limited preview account for us HNers that doesn't let us date anyone but does let us check out what you built and sort of inspect things. That will help shine some positive light on Meteor with our crowd, many of whom will likely be unwilling to share an experimental Jewish dating site with their Facebook friends on a whim.
- triplesec 14y ago
  yes, that's very "mid-period facebook" to force invitations on three friends (indeed I'm not sure that Facebook allows that any more for apps because of the annoyances). I'd also like to try it too, otherwise, since it's for both Jewish and Allies, as it were.
belisarius222 14y ago
jspot dev here. fixed speed issue with help from Nick Martin from Meteor. Turns out I was running a dev-mode proxy to auto-reload code, but Nick figured out we could bypass it in the nginx config. Should be much faster now.
asdfadsfasdf 14y ago
do the links (pictures of famous news sites like they they actually mentioned your site) link to something? or are they just random pics?
ibudiallo 14y ago
I guess your blog doesn't allow mobile, so I'm out. What's up with under construction just le the mobile user view it.
- triplesec 14y ago
  You could try setting your mobile browser (default, or say Dolphin) to report itself as a desktop client. Workaround, and I usually have one of my mobile browsers set up like this for suboptimal mobile sites.
  - ibudiallo 14y ago
    You are right, but most of the time, when a website is that complicated to access, it is not worth it.
orangethirty 14y ago
First time it did not load after waiting 32 seconds. Second time it did load, but after waiting 7 seconds.
svachalek 14y ago
I think Meteor is fantastic in most respects but the REST-unfriendliness of it is a little puzzling in this day and age. It would be really nice to see it play well with others.
- debergalis 14y ago
  [meteor dev] Thanks. We're getting close to implementing a principled approach to REST endpoints and server-side routing. https://trello.com/card/page-model-server-side-rendering-rest-endpoints/508721606e02bb9d570016ae/7 https://trello.com/card/page-model-server-side-rendering-res...
mcot2 14y ago
I would be a lot more interested in meteor if it took more of a library approach and wasn't tied specifically to node.js and mongodb. I understand they are moving towards this by having a protocol and different adapters for other databases.
adambom 14y ago
This doesn't work on my computer. Do I need to have Javascript installed? How do I do that?
- krapp 14y ago
  Use a modern browser.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
stuffihavemade 14y ago
What are the advantages to using Meteor over Rails/Django/Express, etc., for a dating site? Sure, the client server model is compelling, but you're giving up not only the Ruby/Python ecosystem, but the Node one as well. Did you consider something like Derby.js, which uses npm and is built on express?

63 points by belisarius222 14y ago

Might be a good idea to at least put <noscript>This page requires JavaScript</noscript> on your site. All I see an expanse of white.

aroman 14y ago
The last few lines of the article shed some light on OP's opinion of browsing with JavaScript disabled: "you need to support browsers that don't have JavaScript enabled. ... ok, that last one was sufficiently low-probability that I'll stop there before I start telling you not to use Meteor if your customers gave up their computers in favor of the abacus."
- Volpe 14y ago
  I don't quite understand the whole "I cripple my browser" thing. Like, if you are going to disable javascript, why not CSS, and if you disable both of those... by not disable the renderer and just read the html... or demand people write plain text websites. Javascript seems rather arbitrary... But I do wonder about the accessibility ramifications of only supporting javascript. Do all browsers support javascript?
  - stavrianos 14y ago
    For a sufficiently lax definition of "browser", no. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#JavaScript_support http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Java...
  - Wilya 14y ago
    > why not CSS Disabling useless CSS stuff is pretty much what Readability is all about. Besides, CSS generally doesn't claim much of my CPU to display peripheral stuff. Javascript, on the other hand ...
jacalata 14y ago
I'm running a boilerplate firefox and on first load, I saw the same thing.

pqdbr 14y ago

I liked the article a lot, got excited about giving Meteor a go for our next project, but then I checked out your website and got bummed. It takes +10 seconds to load ... the "loading " message. And then it just sits there, spinning the jewish logo.

saint-loup 14y ago

I'm sorry, but why would you put something like this in your CSS: text-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,.5); It makes the text blurred and jarring.

stavrianos 14y ago
Perhaps an attempt to force/fake font smoothing?

belisarius222 14y ago

@saint-loup Good catch! That was old code, not noticeable in my usual browser. It's gone now.

paulyg 14y ago

"Coming soon on mobile. Check it out on your desktop or laptop." Really?

amadeus 14y ago

How can Meteor be taken seriously with shit like this? This site barely works... Simply hangs with spinning jewish logos...

gfodor 14y ago
This could be anything, and be completely unrelated to meteor or related in a way that has no bearing on the claims of the article. He did just launch, after all.
- amadeus 14y ago
  I've had a couple of my sites hit by Hacker News before, it's not that much traffic. But I am perhaps a bit biased, I already think Meteor is a joke of a product.
  - gfodor 14y ago
    Most big things start out as jokes. (I don't hold an opinion one way or the other.) But you have to admit they are doing something semi-interesting.
    - amadeus 14y ago
      I prefer to be interested in things that are ACTUALLY interesting; think Google's Spanner, SpaceX, etc, developed by neckbeards who know what they are doing. Not some silly NodeJS/MongoDB API.
      - gfodor 14y ago
        It's generally unkind to come in and trash other peoples' work, especially when it's work that is something designed to help make others' jobs easier and is being open sourced.
        faceyspacey 14y ago

jbm 14y ago

Can't access as my phone gets redirected to an empty mobile page.

primigenus 14y ago

I'm excited to try out your dating site given that it's built with Meteor and I'm a fan, but having to sign up three of my female friends to see it first is a buzz kill. Perhaps you could consider a limited preview account for us HNers that doesn't let us date anyone but does let us check out what you built and sort of inspect things. That will help shine some positive light on Meteor with our crowd, many of whom will likely be unwilling to share an experimental Jewish dating site with their Facebook friends on a whim.

triplesec 14y ago
yes, that's very "mid-period facebook" to force invitations on three friends (indeed I'm not sure that Facebook allows that any more for apps because of the annoyances). I'd also like to try it too, otherwise, since it's for both Jewish and Allies, as it were.

belisarius222 14y ago

jspot dev here. fixed speed issue with help from Nick Martin from Meteor. Turns out I was running a dev-mode proxy to auto-reload code, but Nick figured out we could bypass it in the nginx config. Should be much faster now.

asdfadsfasdf 14y ago

do the links (pictures of famous news sites like they they actually mentioned your site) link to something? or are they just random pics?

ibudiallo 14y ago

I guess your blog doesn't allow mobile, so I'm out. What's up with under construction just le the mobile user view it.

triplesec 14y ago
You could try setting your mobile browser (default, or say Dolphin) to report itself as a desktop client. Workaround, and I usually have one of my mobile browsers set up like this for suboptimal mobile sites.
- ibudiallo 14y ago
  You are right, but most of the time, when a website is that complicated to access, it is not worth it.

orangethirty 14y ago

First time it did not load after waiting 32 seconds. Second time it did load, but after waiting 7 seconds.

svachalek 14y ago

I think Meteor is fantastic in most respects but the REST-unfriendliness of it is a little puzzling in this day and age. It would be really nice to see it play well with others.

debergalis 14y ago
[meteor dev] Thanks. We're getting close to implementing a principled approach to REST endpoints and server-side routing. https://trello.com/card/page-model-server-side-rendering-rest-endpoints/508721606e02bb9d570016ae/7 https://trello.com/card/page-model-server-side-rendering-res...

mcot2 14y ago

I would be a lot more interested in meteor if it took more of a library approach and wasn't tied specifically to node.js and mongodb. I understand they are moving towards this by having a protocol and different adapters for other databases.

adambom 14y ago

This doesn't work on my computer. Do I need to have Javascript installed? How do I do that?

krapp 14y ago
Use a modern browser.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

stuffihavemade 14y ago

What are the advantages to using Meteor over Rails/Django/Express, etc., for a dating site? Sure, the client server model is compelling, but you're giving up not only the Ruby/Python ecosystem, but the Node one as well. Did you consider something like Derby.js, which uses npm and is built on express?