[bwhitty]

Meteor is about the UX.

The ease of getting up and running, the ease of tools, and the ease of deployment. On no React stack can you (and in the future this will be more simple) run

  meteor create my-react-project
  npm init && npm install react

And start coding JSX, ES2015/2016 immediately. There is a non-trivial amount of boilerplate and configuration you need to do to get this working my hand, and while it can provide a greater level of control, it undoubtedly adds to the overall weight of code you need to maintain.

Then hypothetically after some time of development, do

  meteor add-platform ios
  meteor add-platform android
  meteor add-platform desktop (this is theoretical currently, but there exist packages which do exactly this)

And have Cordova iOS and Android builds, and an Electron desktop app. Then in a few weeks, do

  meteor deploy

and have a fully monitored application up and running on AWS with Meteor's monitoring and deployment tools. Meteor's play is in the ease of these tools. It is absolutely non-trivial the amount of glue and knowledge you need to create, understand, and maintain the current (and ever-rapidly expanding) Javascript toolchain.

This announcement touches on one of their most thorny issues of being tightly coupled to Mongo. Adding this abstraction layer allowing any UI and any data source is Meteor's ticket to the masses.

[faceyspacey]

When thinking about Meteor's value proposition, it's been neck and neck between what you're saying (which is that of a "universal build tool") vs. it's full stack reactive subscription capabilities. Both of which have been Meteor's 2 most important features.

That said, on the build side of things Webpack and Babel have been giving Meteor a run for its money. It takes more work to build your app with those tools, but it's a lot less work than it used to be using plain NPM, and you now have a lot more customization than in Meteor.

That's why doubling down and continuing the thought of full stack reactivity is so important to Meteor. I'm so glad to hear that they have suited up to upgrade their reactive server-side parts. I hope they put a lot of resources behind it.

If interested, here's my take my take on what "Reactive GraphQL" means to Meteor developers:

https://medium.com/@faceyspacey/what-reactive-graphql-means-...

[enobrev]

I think I get your point, and while I haven't done much with meteor since a few weeks after it was first announce, I recently started a couple react.js projects using jspm. I'm not sure, yet, if jspm is ready for prime-time, but getting started was as simple as:

    npm install [-g] jspm 
    jspm init
    jspm install react

For es6/es7, adjust config.js babelOptions.

I've nothing to add in regards to ios / android / desktop, but for getting up-and-running, jspm seems to do the job quite well.

[djmashko2]

Can you use NPM packages with JSPM?

[enobrev]

Yes you can. NPM and Github. http://jspm.io/

(I have nothing to do with jspm, I've just been using it recently)

[joshowens]

Well said! I actually think the community has done a ton of work on Electron and we will see the desktop option soon too.

This announcement is exciting on many levels and I think some of the unspoken bits will be interesting later too. I hear they are working directly with people at Facebook on this project.

[dfischer]

Yeah, this is pretty huge. Looking forward to it.

[untog]

So... Meteor has templates? You could just as easily do:

    git clone [e-mail] my-react-project
    cd my-react-project
    npm install

[corv]

Meteor isn't just another yeoman.

It's better to understand it as the cathedral to npm's bazaar. Everything down to the third-party packages is cohesive and never needs any wiring up or glue-code.

That's where the productivity gains come from.

[untog]

So, like a smaller bazaar compared to NPMs bazaar? With a more exclusive list of packages certified to work with each other?

[corv]

Exactly whilst the chaotic bazaar is still available when you're in the mood for JS fatigue.

[untog]

To each their own. I'll take the chaotic, decentralised bazaar over the monolithic cathedral. I've been burned by all in or bust platforms before.

[SomeCallMeTim]

Meteor is emphatically NOT all-in-or-bust.

It has a JavaScript framework (Blaze), but also works with Angular or React.

It's tied to Mongo, but this release announcement is about loosening that bond.