7 ms·

Meteor Raises $20M

256 points by brendannee 11y ago

rywalker 11y ago
Congratz to a very smart team. Love how Meteor seeks to include other good Javascript frameworks into the platform (like React, Angular), rather than trying to force an artificial "one true way" — looking forward to seeing Galaxy.
ep103 11y ago
I just wish it wasn't so tightly integrated into everything. I'd love to use Meteor as a library, but I'm always afraid of choosing something that I can't replace later. Either way, best of luck to them!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- adyus 11y ago
  You could always use the DDP library [1] ("REST for websockets") for realtime transfer. It's separate from the "core" Meteor package (a collection of packages, really). There's also a list of libraries for other languages that communicate with Meteor via DDP. [2] [1] https://www.meteor.com/ddp https://www.meteor.com/ddp [2] http://meteorpedia.com/read/DDP_Clients http://meteorpedia.com/read/DDP_Clients
egeozcan 11y ago
I think the primary focus on further development in Meteor should be supporting additional databases officially, and after that, supporting operational transformation and conflict resolution strategies come to mind. In my opinion, they are the biggest hurdles towards creating reliable real-time applications. Official React or Angular support isn't a game-changer. They can already be integrated easily with the reactive data providers.
- trcollinson 11y ago
  I do believe that the Meteor team is working on those database strategies as well as scalability and deployability on top of their push for mobile. Taking a look at who they are hiring (and their job descriptions) is very telling. It should be exciting to see what they come up with!
- kansface 11y ago
  How often do you need OT in practice?
  - dorian-graph 11y ago
    Depends on what you're doing. I'm needing it for my thesis -> app and will probably use ShareJS for now.
smanuel 11y ago
That's cool. Does Meteor actually make, sorry for using such a dirty word, money from something?
- adamnemecek 11y ago
  Hosting.
  - smanuel 11y ago
    I couldn't find any pricing information on their website and that's why I asked. I've heard people using Meteor on Heroku, DO, etc. but I've always wondered why someone would choose Meteor's hosting rather than host Meteor on Heroku (for example) and use a ton of other available plugins.
    - rywalker 11y ago
      Meteor's hosting platform will be optimized for websocket-oriented always-connected applications, with monitoring/auto-scaling features for that sort of app.
      - smanuel 11y ago
        Hmm, I didn't know that apps that use websockets needed a different kind of auto-scaling and monitoring. That's interesting. Thanks!
        yannski 11y ago
        Yep, that's... interesting. For sure real time web application needs better reactivity when scaling up and down. But you can already achieve this kind of reaction time on existing platforms that uses Docker for example (disclaimer: I'm working on the Scalingo PaaS that already supports MeteorJS app, see https://scalingo.com/meteorjs-hosting https://scalingo.com/meteorjs-hosting).
        11y ago
auvi 11y ago
Can anybody tell me what is the business model of Meteor? If they are getting investments, the investors has some idea of a ROI and what that could be?
- Cshelton 11y ago
  My best guess...20m is a small amount to invest in your tools. It's a development budget so other companies can utilize the tool for greater leverage. (What they believe to be faster development time with quick iterations and quick MVPs)
- rglover 11y ago
  They're working on a paid hosting platform called Galaxy that will be designed for quick, easy deployment of Meteor apps. If you work with the framework now, you can deploy to an early version of Galaxy using the command `meteor deploy` (yes, that's it) from your project directory. The goal is to keep that level of simplicity, but offer a platform that's production-grade.
- dguaraglia 11y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if someone saw Google's acquisition of Firebase as a sign that they can invest in similar technologies and hope that Apple, Facebook or Yahoo will buy them in response. It's a terrible model, but hey... Clinkle.
richenglish 11y ago
What happens to Meteor if Galaxy fails as a commercial endeavour?
- DeBraid 11y ago
  https://github.com/meteor/meteor https://github.com/meteor/meteor is open source, so the community will be tasked with maintenance in the case of MDG running out of money.
  - gooseus 11y ago
    When Meteor is no longer commercially viable and runs out of venture capital brewed hype-juice everyone will jump to the Next Big Thing and companies that listened to their Meteor evangelist will have to furiously find someone to port from Meteor to ANYTHING so they can continue to build features and support new services. Bless me with your downvotes Meteor zealots! I'll still be here when Meteor is has gone the way of Flash and ColdFusion.
    - rralian 11y ago
      As mentioned, it's open source and gaining traction. If MDG goes away, I see no reason why meteor could not or would not stand as a viable web framework.
      - gooseus 11y ago
        Gaining traction because of the venture capital hype juice I mentioned. There are lots of open-source and "viable" web frameworks out there. People want Meteor because it makes a lot of promises regarding productivity, but (as the presence of this article and multiple comments prove) the real interest is in a framework that has money for continued development. So without the financial backing Meteor is just another open-source web framework. Except if that happens, instead of just replacing it with Angular, Ember, Knockout, etc, you'll also have to replace the entire backend too! I've already had to do this and while I enjoyed it in some ways and learned a bunch... I really don't think that my company enjoyed paying me to rebuild a platform that they already paid for because the Meteor evangelist they hired before me decided they wanted to be an overpaid consultant instead.
sergiotapia 11y ago
I looked into Meteor and it's amazing how everything clicks together. It's just such a drastic change in complexity and feels like a breath of fresh air. The one thing that made me drop it as the choice for a primary stack was the fact that it's tied so heavily into MongoDB. Meteor has a mongodb 'server' replicated client side, that's how they can actually make Meteor so god damn snappy, it's latancy compensation. If they were to integrate something like Postgresql into Meteor, I would easily switch over from Rails and it would become my de-facto web stack. I'll just keep building Rails APIs with EmberJS clients until then, I do hope it's soon though. I loved working with Meteor.
- rglover 11y ago
  Folks are working on it: https://github.com/numtel/meteor-pg https://github.com/numtel/meteor-pg. Also there are plans for core support down the road.
  - sergiotapia 11y ago
    Oh I know, the guys are very open about the roadmap, they have a Trello board. I'm counting the days where I can finally go all in with Meteor. Everyone I know IRL is excited for Meteor but Mongo is what kept everyone sort of away.
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  Yes, Mongo dependency is a dealbreaker for many people who would like to be using it.
- joeriel 11y ago
  SQL support is the biggest ask on their Trello board. https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap There are some good packages on Atmosphere for PostgreSQL, but I think that it needs to be officially supported/integrated for many people to be comfortable with it.
- wishinghand 11y ago
  Postgresql would be great, though if they wanted to keep the document style database of Mongo, maybe they could use something like RethinkDB and use its javascript driver?
murbard2 11y ago
I'm actually looking into meteor at the moment, and the financial backing is a big plus, as it gives me some guarantee that the project will keep being maintained for the foreseeable future. It is indeed a breeze to prototype applications with it, but I am a little bit concerned about the costs of getting an actual production ready site with it. For intance, when is it ever OK to let your client write directly in the database, even for their own data? If you're going to pass their calls through a deny and allow call, why not just expose RPCs to the client that will handle any writing? It seems that a lot of the light versality you have at prototyping time is lost whenever you have to get it production ready. There is definitely some value in light prototypes, but it looks like a real pain to go from prototype to production. Likewise, I'm confused about how to get around the limitations of mongodb. Say you run a store with a finite inventory, how do you handle concurrent purchases? How about a website to enroll into classes? How about a webforum which can have exactly 5 administrators?
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  Do yourself a favor and set aside a weekend to go through this book: https://www.discovermeteor.com/ https://www.discovermeteor.com/ All of your questions are answered there.
  - afandian 11y ago
    As an onlooker that's discouraging. Can you give one-line answers to the points above?
    - DiNovi 11y ago
      Cant tell if this is sarcasm or not :P
      - afandian 11y ago
        No, genuine comment. Those are reasonable questions, and the answer "spend a weekend reading a book" isn't great.
BurningFrog 11y ago
Is anyone hiring Meteor developers? In the Bay Area?
- dweldon 11y ago
  Yep, Edthena is! You can see our profile and job description here: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/company/edthena http://careers.stackoverflow.com/company/edthena If interested, you can apply through the site or just email me: dave at edthena dot com
- spacemarine 11y ago
  Hedgy.co is looking for awesome people and we happen to be using meteor for our FE development. Feel free to reach out to me directly at kevin at hedgy dot co
- skirunman 11y ago
  I'm the CEO of a stealth mode startup in SF that is using Meteor in a B2B CRM application. We are looking for Meteor developers and you can reach me at jim at clozertech dot com.
TimJRobinson 11y ago
Is anyone here running Meteor in production? I've seen so many intro's and demo's and prototypes but have yet to see any actual products / companies built around it yet.
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  Check their home page - and those exact words you used just now, those look awfully familiar to what people used to write when Rails first came out. :) I have such high hopes for Meteor!
- nileshtrivedi 11y ago
  Sidebar.io is based on Telescope which powers a number of sites: http://sidebar.io/ http://sidebar.io/
  - matthewmacleod 11y ago
    Hmm. Sidebar is an example of a site that has no reason to use client-side scripting at all. It's a plain list of links, and yet doesn't work without Javascript, and is far, far slower than it should be.
    - s_kilk 11y ago
      A good summary of pop-webdev in 2015
    - sgdesign 11y ago
      Creator of Sidebar here. You're right, it's not the best showcase of Meteor. The reason it's this way is because it's running on a very old fork of Telescope (http://telescopeapp.org http://telescopeapp.org), and I haven't had time to update it. But you make some good points. Meteor is not for everything, and if I had known from the start that Sidebar would end up being just a list of links I might have used a different stack (like Rails, or even a static site generator).
- karldanninger 11y ago
yedpodtrzitko 11y ago
https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nichochar 11y ago
I like meteor, I think it's a good framework, that solves well the "Make a webapp with non critical data but where real time is critical" problem. I've also used angular, which I also like, but has a little bit more of a learning curve drawback. I do unfortunately believe that a project or framework should make it not because it's CEO or leader is good at selling something, pitching VC's, and creating a brand, I think a project or framework should make it because it is the crowdsourced best solution to a problem. And this kind of money raising worries me a little, because it gives an unfair advantage to a framework. Now meteor might be the best answer, but if it's not, this is a shame and we all stand to miss out on a potential right answer for this... Anyway, all of this is a little moot because I believe you shouldn't be using javascript for this kind of stuff ^^ but that's another debate altogether
- wmf 11y ago
  It's way too late for that anyway. AFAIK DerbyJS was better than Meteor all along but no one has heard of it.
  - akhatri_aus 11y ago
    I've heard of it and have used both and disagree. Keep in mind both are open source projects. The community has been immensely successful filling up Meteor's gaps.
    - gooseus 11y ago
      The investors are extremely appreciative of that... it'd be a shame if they had to invest in actual filling out their own gaps with the 20M they've raised. That money is better spent convincing other developers that Meteor has no gaps.
- auganov 11y ago
  I don't agree about the unfairness or that it will have a negative effect. But I do think that Meteor's nature as a framework, might be its downfall as a company. I have a hard time imagining how Meteor is going to be able to contain or maintain control over the project given how broad it is. They'll need to provide really strong integration benefits to fight unbundling.
neumino 11y ago
Woot, congrats folks!
pdkl95 11y ago
sigh At least judging by www.meteor.com, they are still insisting their users accept the risks[1] of javascript and sending an empty body tag. [1] If you think these risks don't exist, you haven't been paying attention. I don't care if you want to run exploit code from an ad or be used as ammunition by the Great Cannon; just don't insist that others must accept that risk if they want to read your page (slower loads or reduced functionality with the javascript is perfectly fine). edit: So you all value convenience over safety. really, it's probably because you're so used to spying on people that the idea of losing that ability is a thought you cannot abide. After all, why would the idea of losing javascript be attacked so strongly? This gets downvotes faster than anything else. What a lot of website developers don't seem to understand is that recording hover times, click paths, reading times and the like may be "metrics" or "important business data" to you, to normal people that is "creepy peeping-tom" behavior. I know, you're thinking that this is off topic, or that it's just a tool. No, you're making a political/sociological decision by forcing people to take the risk of javascirpt - and business recording information about people is risk #1. The non-technical people I know, after slowly learning about how the tech industry really works, have been doing a lot to reduce their internet use. A few have turned luddite. Others are trying to reduce their dependence on network services. That is the end game of people finding out the real price of using some webapp - you're driving people away from the entire concept. Of course, I'm wasting my breath - clearly the features of some tool are more important than the reality of the future you're creating. Either that, or djb is right. ( http://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.05.08/slides-djb-20150508-a4.pdf http://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.05.08/slides-djb-20150508-a4.pdf )
- akhatri_aus 11y ago
  Most sites use javascript anyway. How is this different? If people want to use Meteor to solve their business problem (even internally) how does the negligibly low chance of a great canon infecting a site make this different. There's also a couple of libraries that implement server-side rendering if the blank page is something that disturbs you. Ps the loads are faster due to caching & are highly CDNable as they don't change at all. Mostly static. For the great canon issue: it's not difficult to check against a hash on the script either right? Besides not exlusively being a Meteor problem.
cdnsteve 11y ago
Has anyone seen DDP used outside of Meteor? https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/ddp/DDP.md https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/ddp/DDP...
- rgoomar 11y ago
  I haven't seen a push for it outside of Meteor yet, but i'm sure that is one of the things that they would want to push for later. Although, there are various DDP clients for other languages as you can see here: http://meteorpedia.com/read/DDP_Clients http://meteorpedia.com/read/DDP_Clients
- dethos 11y ago
  One example: https://github.com/whitesmith/meteor-motion https://github.com/whitesmith/meteor-motion
- imslavko 11y ago
  (I work at Meteor). There have been some discussions with Asana (asana.com) teams who are building their new data store with a DDP API published for their clients.
- GVRV 11y ago
  We use it to interface with our Django projects https://github.com/commoncode/django-ddp/ https://github.com/commoncode/django-ddp/
- dorian-graph 11y ago
  I'm writing an Arduino library at the moment as a small part of my thesis which I'll release.
danenania 11y ago
Beginner question: how does Meteor handle storing server-side web socket connections in a scalable way? Are they kept in ram? Redis? Mongo's ram? The complexity of this is why I always end up reaching for hosted WS solutions like pusher or fanout.io.
- merb 11y ago
  Why is this complex? There are so many ways for pub/sub implementations. However I always ended up using Playframework for WS, since it's really really easy to set this up in a scalable way.
  - danenania 11y ago
    WS are fundamentally more complex than HTTP since connections are stateful and that state needs to be stored somewhere. It's another dimension that needs to be properly distributed and load balanced to be scalable. It's not something you need to worry about for small applications, but for a scalable architecture, it's important to know the details of how this works. What happens to Meteor (or Play) with 100k simultaneous connections? How much ram and how many servers will I need? How do I load balance WS data between them? Will another datastore like redis be required? If so, how does it integrate with the framework? What if I outgrow a single instance of that datastore? If I use pusher, I don't have to think about any of this.
smaili 11y ago
Not trying to sound like a jerk, but I'm just wondering is it really a good thing to put on your homepage that there are nearly 12K questions posted on StackOverflow about Meteor? Seeing a number like that makes me wonder if maybe the documentation and or APIs are not very well done if it's generated that kind of activity on SO.
- acgourley 11y ago
  Personally I see it as positive - it means people are using it and I often find searching SO answers faster than searching docs.
- trcollinson 11y ago
  Maybe it works as the opposite. On SO there are ~800,000 questions about Java, Javascript, and C#, each.
- akhatri_aus 11y ago
  Maybe on SO questions are answered very efficiently. It doesn't mean the documentation is bad. It means the community is very at it and its a place to go if you have a question and don't want to dive into the docs Alot of people do prefer personalised answers over the effort of finding it in docs, sad reality.
- gooseus 11y ago
  Maybe you're right and everyone else on this comment thread are suffering from some cognitive dissonance? I'd be willing to bet much of those SO questions and replies are a part of keeping up the Meteor hype with most questions being answered by a core group of devs. The PR machine for Meteor is crazy. It's funny because this 20M will go to generating more hype and PR opportunities, while the actual development will fall to these wide-eyed open-source evangelists who will give up their time for free to make it better. Then Meteor will be sold to Facebook and all these open source developers will realize that their work was driving up the valuation for a bunch of investors who couldn't care less about their code or the products it powered. I'm having a relatively cynical day, I can't tell if I woke up this way or if this Meteor news is what set me off.
arxpoetica 11y ago
A few of us have been happily hacking away on SocketStream (https://socketstream.com/ https://socketstream.com/) for quite sometime. It's a smaller, piecemeal framework that borrows more from the community of Node pluggable/playable modules. With this 20M, Meteor just became a heavy-weight— That said, I still like the idea of a more community-drive approach.
- arxpoetica 11y ago
  Also, shameless plug, but we've been keen to sponsorship and/or other contributors to get a little more momentum in the SS community. Ping me over here if interested so I don't completely derail this thread. ;) http://robertlangfordhall.com/contact/ http://robertlangfordhall.com/contact/
dovg 11y ago
Serious question: does Meteor scale well in these days?
- davidjwoody 11y ago
  Just published a post related to this topic. Short answer: Yes. - http://blog.differential.com/scaling-meteor-to-20000-users-in-7-days/ http://blog.differential.com/scaling-meteor-to-20000-users-i...
  - Everhusk 11y ago
    Awesome job and congrats on the massive traction on launch day. Thanks for sharing!
debaserab2 11y ago
It's amazing how many developers willingly giving up their entire tech stack in exchange for a proprietary one. If it was MSFT trying to pull this off, would the reaction on HN be as positive?
- trcollinson 11y ago
  Maybe I am getting lost in your comment but, are you trying to suggest that Meteor is a proprietary stack?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
_greim_ 11y ago
My worry is that with JavaScript-based stacks evolving so fast these days, monied interest in one way of doing things would ultimately be incentivized to suppress better ways of doing things, as they emerge.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
Kiro 11y ago
What I don't understand with Meteor is how you can build secure applications if you actually write your database queries in the front-end. Can someone enlighten me? How do you hide logic or prevent people from manipulating however they want?
- djmashko2 11y ago
  Database modifications on the client are usually disabled in Meteor. There are two ways to control database access in Meteor: 1. You can write allow/deny permissions rules to allow only certain modifications: http://docs.meteor.com/#/basic/Mongo-Collection-allow http://docs.meteor.com/#/basic/Mongo-Collection-allow 2. You can not use client-side modifications at all and instead write all of your database code inside Methods, which are basically supercharged RPCs that give you automatic optimistic UI updates: https://www.meteor.com/try/10 https://www.meteor.com/try/10 I think this issue comes up a lot because new Meteor apps come with the "insecure" package by default to enable faster initial development and debugging, but most or all production apps will remove this package. (I work at Meteor)
M8 11y ago
Oh, so that's why they have been trying to sell it here on HN.
aliakhtar 11y ago
For those who're looking for a full stack framework, I can't recommend GWT enough. GWT lets you write java for both client & server, and then compiles the client code to javascript. This compiled js is highly optimized and your css / images / html templates are bundled together to minimize HTTP requests. On the server side, this lets you use java which is a lot more performant than javascript is.
- smileysteve 11y ago
  > On the server side, this lets you use java which is a lot more performant than javascript is. Is it? http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/javascript.html http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/javascript.html
  - aliakhtar 11y ago
    Yep: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ Its also fairly obvious that a statically typed / compiled language will have better performance than an interpreted language. Compiler optimizations make a huge difference as well. Also, even the link you gave shows js being slightly faster in 2 or 3 benchmarks, but for the remaining 4-5, java is significantly faster.
galfarragem 11y ago
I think the main issue with Meteor is that it has the possibility to change the status quo and be an important player in the market. That 'pisses' a lot of people (like once rails did) because it might turn some of their personal investment into obsolete. I am not 'invested' (my background is not CS) but if I was, I would certainly be pissed also. People here are even pissed that they got more money and other frameworks didn't. Nobody invest (their money at least) without a good risk/reward ratio.
shams93 11y ago
Lol Meteor just literally saved my bacon, the combination of meteor + ionic enabled me to build an entire app in less than two weeks working part time on it and if I hadn't told the client it wasn't native there was no way for them to tell, the performance is that good. Plus the error messaging is awesome and the isometric approach is just a huge win, the previous version of the product was in angular + rails, industry standard but slow as hell, absolutely did not perform like a native mobile app, but Meteor is just fantastic in my experience for extreme starup scenarios where we are going with Mongo anyways. Certainly if I needed to tie into legacy sql based systems I would be looking at loopback, but with lookback you are still stuck with the weight of the other available front end frameworks and the back end is easier, but you still have to do tons of boiler plate, except perhaps with react + loopback in the case of place a really modern front end on a legacy system while still having ok performance. Meteor feels native because you're not issuing all this old ajax, its data format is even smaller and tighter than json.
atmosx 11y ago
Out of curiosity, did ever rails raise any money?

256 points by brendannee 11y ago

Congratz to a very smart team. Love how Meteor seeks to include other good Javascript frameworks into the platform (like React, Angular), rather than trying to force an artificial "one true way" — looking forward to seeing Galaxy.

ep103 11y ago

I just wish it wasn't so tightly integrated into everything. I'd love to use Meteor as a library, but I'm always afraid of choosing something that I can't replace later. Either way, best of luck to them!

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
adyus 11y ago
You could always use the DDP library [1] ("REST for websockets") for realtime transfer. It's separate from the "core" Meteor package (a collection of packages, really). There's also a list of libraries for other languages that communicate with Meteor via DDP. [2] [1] https://www.meteor.com/ddp https://www.meteor.com/ddp [2] http://meteorpedia.com/read/DDP_Clients http://meteorpedia.com/read/DDP_Clients

egeozcan 11y ago

I think the primary focus on further development in Meteor should be supporting additional databases officially, and after that, supporting operational transformation and conflict resolution strategies come to mind. In my opinion, they are the biggest hurdles towards creating reliable real-time applications. Official React or Angular support isn't a game-changer. They can already be integrated easily with the reactive data providers.

trcollinson 11y ago
I do believe that the Meteor team is working on those database strategies as well as scalability and deployability on top of their push for mobile. Taking a look at who they are hiring (and their job descriptions) is very telling. It should be exciting to see what they come up with!
kansface 11y ago
How often do you need OT in practice?
- dorian-graph 11y ago
  Depends on what you're doing. I'm needing it for my thesis -> app and will probably use ShareJS for now.

smanuel 11y ago

That's cool. Does Meteor actually make, sorry for using such a dirty word, money from something?

adamnemecek 11y ago
Hosting.
- smanuel 11y ago
  I couldn't find any pricing information on their website and that's why I asked. I've heard people using Meteor on Heroku, DO, etc. but I've always wondered why someone would choose Meteor's hosting rather than host Meteor on Heroku (for example) and use a ton of other available plugins.
  - rywalker 11y ago
    Meteor's hosting platform will be optimized for websocket-oriented always-connected applications, with monitoring/auto-scaling features for that sort of app.
    - smanuel 11y ago
      Hmm, I didn't know that apps that use websockets needed a different kind of auto-scaling and monitoring. That's interesting. Thanks!
      - yannski 11y ago
        Yep, that's... interesting. For sure real time web application needs better reactivity when scaling up and down. But you can already achieve this kind of reaction time on existing platforms that uses Docker for example (disclaimer: I'm working on the Scalingo PaaS that already supports MeteorJS app, see https://scalingo.com/meteorjs-hosting https://scalingo.com/meteorjs-hosting).
        11y ago

auvi 11y ago

Can anybody tell me what is the business model of Meteor? If they are getting investments, the investors has some idea of a ROI and what that could be?

Cshelton 11y ago
My best guess...20m is a small amount to invest in your tools. It's a development budget so other companies can utilize the tool for greater leverage. (What they believe to be faster development time with quick iterations and quick MVPs)
rglover 11y ago
They're working on a paid hosting platform called Galaxy that will be designed for quick, easy deployment of Meteor apps. If you work with the framework now, you can deploy to an early version of Galaxy using the command `meteor deploy` (yes, that's it) from your project directory. The goal is to keep that level of simplicity, but offer a platform that's production-grade.
dguaraglia 11y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if someone saw Google's acquisition of Firebase as a sign that they can invest in similar technologies and hope that Apple, Facebook or Yahoo will buy them in response. It's a terrible model, but hey... Clinkle.

richenglish 11y ago

What happens to Meteor if Galaxy fails as a commercial endeavour?

DeBraid 11y ago
https://github.com/meteor/meteor https://github.com/meteor/meteor is open source, so the community will be tasked with maintenance in the case of MDG running out of money.
- gooseus 11y ago
  When Meteor is no longer commercially viable and runs out of venture capital brewed hype-juice everyone will jump to the Next Big Thing and companies that listened to their Meteor evangelist will have to furiously find someone to port from Meteor to ANYTHING so they can continue to build features and support new services. Bless me with your downvotes Meteor zealots! I'll still be here when Meteor is has gone the way of Flash and ColdFusion.
  - rralian 11y ago
    As mentioned, it's open source and gaining traction. If MDG goes away, I see no reason why meteor could not or would not stand as a viable web framework.
    - gooseus 11y ago
      Gaining traction because of the venture capital hype juice I mentioned. There are lots of open-source and "viable" web frameworks out there. People want Meteor because it makes a lot of promises regarding productivity, but (as the presence of this article and multiple comments prove) the real interest is in a framework that has money for continued development. So without the financial backing Meteor is just another open-source web framework. Except if that happens, instead of just replacing it with Angular, Ember, Knockout, etc, you'll also have to replace the entire backend too! I've already had to do this and while I enjoyed it in some ways and learned a bunch... I really don't think that my company enjoyed paying me to rebuild a platform that they already paid for because the Meteor evangelist they hired before me decided they wanted to be an overpaid consultant instead.

sergiotapia 11y ago

I looked into Meteor and it's amazing how everything clicks together. It's just such a drastic change in complexity and feels like a breath of fresh air. The one thing that made me drop it as the choice for a primary stack was the fact that it's tied so heavily into MongoDB. Meteor has a mongodb 'server' replicated client side, that's how they can actually make Meteor so god damn snappy, it's latancy compensation. If they were to integrate something like Postgresql into Meteor, I would easily switch over from Rails and it would become my de-facto web stack. I'll just keep building Rails APIs with EmberJS clients until then, I do hope it's soon though. I loved working with Meteor.

rglover 11y ago
Folks are working on it: https://github.com/numtel/meteor-pg https://github.com/numtel/meteor-pg. Also there are plans for core support down the road.
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  Oh I know, the guys are very open about the roadmap, they have a Trello board. I'm counting the days where I can finally go all in with Meteor. Everyone I know IRL is excited for Meteor but Mongo is what kept everyone sort of away.
fiatmoney 11y ago
Yes, Mongo dependency is a dealbreaker for many people who would like to be using it.
joeriel 11y ago
SQL support is the biggest ask on their Trello board. https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap There are some good packages on Atmosphere for PostgreSQL, but I think that it needs to be officially supported/integrated for many people to be comfortable with it.
wishinghand 11y ago
Postgresql would be great, though if they wanted to keep the document style database of Mongo, maybe they could use something like RethinkDB and use its javascript driver?

murbard2 11y ago

I'm actually looking into meteor at the moment, and the financial backing is a big plus, as it gives me some guarantee that the project will keep being maintained for the foreseeable future. It is indeed a breeze to prototype applications with it, but I am a little bit concerned about the costs of getting an actual production ready site with it. For intance, when is it ever OK to let your client write directly in the database, even for their own data? If you're going to pass their calls through a deny and allow call, why not just expose RPCs to the client that will handle any writing? It seems that a lot of the light versality you have at prototyping time is lost whenever you have to get it production ready. There is definitely some value in light prototypes, but it looks like a real pain to go from prototype to production. Likewise, I'm confused about how to get around the limitations of mongodb. Say you run a store with a finite inventory, how do you handle concurrent purchases? How about a website to enroll into classes? How about a webforum which can have exactly 5 administrators?

sergiotapia 11y ago
Do yourself a favor and set aside a weekend to go through this book: https://www.discovermeteor.com/ https://www.discovermeteor.com/ All of your questions are answered there.
- afandian 11y ago
  As an onlooker that's discouraging. Can you give one-line answers to the points above?
  - DiNovi 11y ago
    Cant tell if this is sarcasm or not :P
    - afandian 11y ago
      No, genuine comment. Those are reasonable questions, and the answer "spend a weekend reading a book" isn't great.

BurningFrog 11y ago

Is anyone hiring Meteor developers? In the Bay Area?

dweldon 11y ago
Yep, Edthena is! You can see our profile and job description here: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/company/edthena http://careers.stackoverflow.com/company/edthena If interested, you can apply through the site or just email me: dave at edthena dot com
spacemarine 11y ago
Hedgy.co is looking for awesome people and we happen to be using meteor for our FE development. Feel free to reach out to me directly at kevin at hedgy dot co
skirunman 11y ago
I'm the CEO of a stealth mode startup in SF that is using Meteor in a B2B CRM application. We are looking for Meteor developers and you can reach me at jim at clozertech dot com.

TimJRobinson 11y ago

Is anyone here running Meteor in production? I've seen so many intro's and demo's and prototypes but have yet to see any actual products / companies built around it yet.

sergiotapia 11y ago
Check their home page - and those exact words you used just now, those look awfully familiar to what people used to write when Rails first came out. :) I have such high hopes for Meteor!
nileshtrivedi 11y ago
Sidebar.io is based on Telescope which powers a number of sites: http://sidebar.io/ http://sidebar.io/
- matthewmacleod 11y ago
  Hmm. Sidebar is an example of a site that has no reason to use client-side scripting at all. It's a plain list of links, and yet doesn't work without Javascript, and is far, far slower than it should be.
  - s_kilk 11y ago
    A good summary of pop-webdev in 2015
  - sgdesign 11y ago
    Creator of Sidebar here. You're right, it's not the best showcase of Meteor. The reason it's this way is because it's running on a very old fork of Telescope (http://telescopeapp.org http://telescopeapp.org), and I haven't had time to update it. But you make some good points. Meteor is not for everything, and if I had known from the start that Sidebar would end up being just a list of links I might have used a different stack (like Rails, or even a static site generator).
karldanninger 11y ago

yedpodtrzitko 11y ago

https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

nichochar 11y ago

I like meteor, I think it's a good framework, that solves well the "Make a webapp with non critical data but where real time is critical" problem. I've also used angular, which I also like, but has a little bit more of a learning curve drawback. I do unfortunately believe that a project or framework should make it not because it's CEO or leader is good at selling something, pitching VC's, and creating a brand, I think a project or framework should make it because it is the crowdsourced best solution to a problem. And this kind of money raising worries me a little, because it gives an unfair advantage to a framework. Now meteor might be the best answer, but if it's not, this is a shame and we all stand to miss out on a potential right answer for this... Anyway, all of this is a little moot because I believe you shouldn't be using javascript for this kind of stuff ^^ but that's another debate altogether

wmf 11y ago
It's way too late for that anyway. AFAIK DerbyJS was better than Meteor all along but no one has heard of it.
- akhatri_aus 11y ago
  I've heard of it and have used both and disagree. Keep in mind both are open source projects. The community has been immensely successful filling up Meteor's gaps.
  - gooseus 11y ago
    The investors are extremely appreciative of that... it'd be a shame if they had to invest in actual filling out their own gaps with the 20M they've raised. That money is better spent convincing other developers that Meteor has no gaps.
auganov 11y ago
I don't agree about the unfairness or that it will have a negative effect. But I do think that Meteor's nature as a framework, might be its downfall as a company. I have a hard time imagining how Meteor is going to be able to contain or maintain control over the project given how broad it is. They'll need to provide really strong integration benefits to fight unbundling.

neumino 11y ago

Woot, congrats folks!

pdkl95 11y ago

sigh At least judging by www.meteor.com, they are still insisting their users accept the risks[1] of javascript and sending an empty body tag. [1] If you think these risks don't exist, you haven't been paying attention. I don't care if you want to run exploit code from an ad or be used as ammunition by the Great Cannon; just don't insist that others must accept that risk if they want to read your page (slower loads or reduced functionality with the javascript is perfectly fine). edit: So you all value convenience over safety. really, it's probably because you're so used to spying on people that the idea of losing that ability is a thought you cannot abide. After all, why would the idea of losing javascript be attacked so strongly? This gets downvotes faster than anything else. What a lot of website developers don't seem to understand is that recording hover times, click paths, reading times and the like may be "metrics" or "important business data" to you, to normal people that is "creepy peeping-tom" behavior. I know, you're thinking that this is off topic, or that it's just a tool. No, you're making a political/sociological decision by forcing people to take the risk of javascirpt - and business recording information about people is risk #1. The non-technical people I know, after slowly learning about how the tech industry really works, have been doing a lot to reduce their internet use. A few have turned luddite. Others are trying to reduce their dependence on network services. That is the end game of people finding out the real price of using some webapp - you're driving people away from the entire concept. Of course, I'm wasting my breath - clearly the features of some tool are more important than the reality of the future you're creating. Either that, or djb is right. ( http://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.05.08/slides-djb-20150508-a4.pdf http://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.05.08/slides-djb-20150508-a4.pdf )

akhatri_aus 11y ago
Most sites use javascript anyway. How is this different? If people want to use Meteor to solve their business problem (even internally) how does the negligibly low chance of a great canon infecting a site make this different. There's also a couple of libraries that implement server-side rendering if the blank page is something that disturbs you. Ps the loads are faster due to caching & are highly CDNable as they don't change at all. Mostly static. For the great canon issue: it's not difficult to check against a hash on the script either right? Besides not exlusively being a Meteor problem.

cdnsteve 11y ago

Has anyone seen DDP used outside of Meteor? https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/ddp/DDP.md https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/ddp/DDP...

rgoomar 11y ago
I haven't seen a push for it outside of Meteor yet, but i'm sure that is one of the things that they would want to push for later. Although, there are various DDP clients for other languages as you can see here: http://meteorpedia.com/read/DDP_Clients http://meteorpedia.com/read/DDP_Clients
dethos 11y ago
One example: https://github.com/whitesmith/meteor-motion https://github.com/whitesmith/meteor-motion
imslavko 11y ago
(I work at Meteor). There have been some discussions with Asana (asana.com) teams who are building their new data store with a DDP API published for their clients.
GVRV 11y ago
We use it to interface with our Django projects https://github.com/commoncode/django-ddp/ https://github.com/commoncode/django-ddp/
dorian-graph 11y ago
I'm writing an Arduino library at the moment as a small part of my thesis which I'll release.

danenania 11y ago

Beginner question: how does Meteor handle storing server-side web socket connections in a scalable way? Are they kept in ram? Redis? Mongo's ram? The complexity of this is why I always end up reaching for hosted WS solutions like pusher or fanout.io.

merb 11y ago
Why is this complex? There are so many ways for pub/sub implementations. However I always ended up using Playframework for WS, since it's really really easy to set this up in a scalable way.
- danenania 11y ago
  WS are fundamentally more complex than HTTP since connections are stateful and that state needs to be stored somewhere. It's another dimension that needs to be properly distributed and load balanced to be scalable. It's not something you need to worry about for small applications, but for a scalable architecture, it's important to know the details of how this works. What happens to Meteor (or Play) with 100k simultaneous connections? How much ram and how many servers will I need? How do I load balance WS data between them? Will another datastore like redis be required? If so, how does it integrate with the framework? What if I outgrow a single instance of that datastore? If I use pusher, I don't have to think about any of this.

smaili 11y ago

Not trying to sound like a jerk, but I'm just wondering is it really a good thing to put on your homepage that there are nearly 12K questions posted on StackOverflow about Meteor? Seeing a number like that makes me wonder if maybe the documentation and or APIs are not very well done if it's generated that kind of activity on SO.

acgourley 11y ago
Personally I see it as positive - it means people are using it and I often find searching SO answers faster than searching docs.
trcollinson 11y ago
Maybe it works as the opposite. On SO there are ~800,000 questions about Java, Javascript, and C#, each.
akhatri_aus 11y ago
Maybe on SO questions are answered very efficiently. It doesn't mean the documentation is bad. It means the community is very at it and its a place to go if you have a question and don't want to dive into the docs Alot of people do prefer personalised answers over the effort of finding it in docs, sad reality.
gooseus 11y ago
Maybe you're right and everyone else on this comment thread are suffering from some cognitive dissonance? I'd be willing to bet much of those SO questions and replies are a part of keeping up the Meteor hype with most questions being answered by a core group of devs. The PR machine for Meteor is crazy. It's funny because this 20M will go to generating more hype and PR opportunities, while the actual development will fall to these wide-eyed open-source evangelists who will give up their time for free to make it better. Then Meteor will be sold to Facebook and all these open source developers will realize that their work was driving up the valuation for a bunch of investors who couldn't care less about their code or the products it powered. I'm having a relatively cynical day, I can't tell if I woke up this way or if this Meteor news is what set me off.

arxpoetica 11y ago

A few of us have been happily hacking away on SocketStream (https://socketstream.com/ https://socketstream.com/) for quite sometime. It's a smaller, piecemeal framework that borrows more from the community of Node pluggable/playable modules. With this 20M, Meteor just became a heavy-weight— That said, I still like the idea of a more community-drive approach.

arxpoetica 11y ago
Also, shameless plug, but we've been keen to sponsorship and/or other contributors to get a little more momentum in the SS community. Ping me over here if interested so I don't completely derail this thread. ;) http://robertlangfordhall.com/contact/ http://robertlangfordhall.com/contact/

dovg 11y ago

Serious question: does Meteor scale well in these days?

davidjwoody 11y ago
Just published a post related to this topic. Short answer: Yes. - http://blog.differential.com/scaling-meteor-to-20000-users-in-7-days/ http://blog.differential.com/scaling-meteor-to-20000-users-i...
- Everhusk 11y ago
  Awesome job and congrats on the massive traction on launch day. Thanks for sharing!

debaserab2 11y ago

It's amazing how many developers willingly giving up their entire tech stack in exchange for a proprietary one. If it was MSFT trying to pull this off, would the reaction on HN be as positive?

trcollinson 11y ago
Maybe I am getting lost in your comment but, are you trying to suggest that Meteor is a proprietary stack?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

_greim_ 11y ago

My worry is that with JavaScript-based stacks evolving so fast these days, monied interest in one way of doing things would ultimately be incentivized to suppress better ways of doing things, as they emerge.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

Kiro 11y ago

What I don't understand with Meteor is how you can build secure applications if you actually write your database queries in the front-end. Can someone enlighten me? How do you hide logic or prevent people from manipulating however they want?

djmashko2 11y ago
Database modifications on the client are usually disabled in Meteor. There are two ways to control database access in Meteor: 1. You can write allow/deny permissions rules to allow only certain modifications: http://docs.meteor.com/#/basic/Mongo-Collection-allow http://docs.meteor.com/#/basic/Mongo-Collection-allow 2. You can not use client-side modifications at all and instead write all of your database code inside Methods, which are basically supercharged RPCs that give you automatic optimistic UI updates: https://www.meteor.com/try/10 https://www.meteor.com/try/10 I think this issue comes up a lot because new Meteor apps come with the "insecure" package by default to enable faster initial development and debugging, but most or all production apps will remove this package. (I work at Meteor)

M8 11y ago

Oh, so that's why they have been trying to sell it here on HN.

aliakhtar 11y ago

For those who're looking for a full stack framework, I can't recommend GWT enough. GWT lets you write java for both client & server, and then compiles the client code to javascript. This compiled js is highly optimized and your css / images / html templates are bundled together to minimize HTTP requests. On the server side, this lets you use java which is a lot more performant than javascript is.

smileysteve 11y ago
> On the server side, this lets you use java which is a lot more performant than javascript is. Is it? http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/javascript.html http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/javascript.html
- aliakhtar 11y ago
  Yep: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ Its also fairly obvious that a statically typed / compiled language will have better performance than an interpreted language. Compiler optimizations make a huge difference as well. Also, even the link you gave shows js being slightly faster in 2 or 3 benchmarks, but for the remaining 4-5, java is significantly faster.

galfarragem 11y ago

I think the main issue with Meteor is that it has the possibility to change the status quo and be an important player in the market. That 'pisses' a lot of people (like once rails did) because it might turn some of their personal investment into obsolete. I am not 'invested' (my background is not CS) but if I was, I would certainly be pissed also. People here are even pissed that they got more money and other frameworks didn't. Nobody invest (their money at least) without a good risk/reward ratio.

shams93 11y ago

Lol Meteor just literally saved my bacon, the combination of meteor + ionic enabled me to build an entire app in less than two weeks working part time on it and if I hadn't told the client it wasn't native there was no way for them to tell, the performance is that good. Plus the error messaging is awesome and the isometric approach is just a huge win, the previous version of the product was in angular + rails, industry standard but slow as hell, absolutely did not perform like a native mobile app, but Meteor is just fantastic in my experience for extreme starup scenarios where we are going with Mongo anyways. Certainly if I needed to tie into legacy sql based systems I would be looking at loopback, but with lookback you are still stuck with the weight of the other available front end frameworks and the back end is easier, but you still have to do tons of boiler plate, except perhaps with react + loopback in the case of place a really modern front end on a legacy system while still having ok performance. Meteor feels native because you're not issuing all this old ajax, its data format is even smaller and tighter than json.

atmosx 11y ago

Out of curiosity, did ever rails raise any money?