I don't think either that Meteor is going to become de facto platform for all web development, but it's definitely going to be one of the main ones along with Angular, React and Rails.
I'm curious - do you think there is room for someone to come along with the right combination of stuff to become the "de facto platform for all web development"?
It's interesting also that people always talk about Rails but don't mention JSP and .NET, which I think are actually a lot more popular last time I looked around. I guess it depends on who you ask.
I feel like JavaScript is in a sweet spot right now because it has the inherent advantage of being the _only_ language you can run inside a browser, so you can do things with it that would be very hard or complicated in other languages.
I've wondered to myself a few times: perhaps Meteor would be even more popular than it presently is, if it had not been chained to MongoDB from the start. Even a different NoSQL db would probably have been a more popular/respected choice, at this point.
And, though I know this has been said before, it bears repeating: most developers who deal with data on a regular basis are best advised to go ahead and get comfortable with SQL. So far, it is BY FAR the best solution to the great majority of data-storage-and-retrieval use cases. I'm no expert, tis true, but I don't see JSON objects replacing SQL any time soon.
So, yes: as soon as Meteor includes official support for one of the SQL platforms, I'm all over it. It seems very promising, for those of us not locked in a death-rattle of foaming, red-faced JavaScript hatred.
Good question. I think Meteor is certainly the closest of such platform at the moment, but you don't have to go far to find a developer who really hates JavaScript and will never switch over. Such hate may or may not be justified, but you won't easily change their minds. At the same time, there are people - including me - who only develop with JS with no real need to switch over to something else.
I wish I had a more educated answer (guess?), since this is all just anecdata.
Has anyone built an Ecommerce platform in Meteor? Meteor is just this months hotness for building a specific type of web product, namely web apps. It's not going to become the defacto standard of anything else.
I've messed with it some, and so far, I'm not seeing what the advantage is on using Javascript on the server rather than Ruby or some other more advanced dynamic language. Ruby seems to have more advanced features and a better ecosystem around it.
I'm a data guy whose realized that all of the fancy data stuff in the world tends to be useless without a UI. I don't have time to put all of my effort into web apps, because then I'd have to take my focus off the data/business functions piece.
Meteor has been perfect for me. It works, I can easily integrate with it via the Mongo back-end, and the prototyping is super-fast. For the kinds of apps that I build (very industry specific apps for retail) I don't really have to worry about scaling to thousands of users, which means that Meteor isn't just a toy in my world. And even if I did have to scale, everything about the Meteor framework indicates that scaling Meteor is no different than scaling any other Node app.
When Postgres support comes, (its in the works) I'll be using this thing for everything.
It's interesting also that people always talk about Rails but don't mention JSP and .NET, which I think are actually a lot more popular last time I looked around. I guess it depends on who you ask.
I feel like JavaScript is in a sweet spot right now because it has the inherent advantage of being the _only_ language you can run inside a browser, so you can do things with it that would be very hard or complicated in other languages.