[ekryski]

Disclosure, I'm one of the creators of Feathers.

You are right Feathers is MIT and so is Meteor. They both do real-time, albeit a bit differently, so we like to consider Meteor an alternative to Feathers and vice-versa.

We are trying to be as transparent as possible and because we don't currently have any formal support from anyone except for the contributor's time and energy, we rely heavily on the community and need to remain as open as possible.

Personally, I think Meteor has done some amazing stuff and some not so amazing things. I respect a lot of what they have achieved but we are making a different attempt at similar problems. Nothing more to it than that really. We've tried to put up objective comparisons between Feathers and many of the real-time solutions out there http://docs.feathersjs.com/why/vs/readme.html. There is no silver bullet for all situations and all people.

[faceyspacey]

Except, claiming you guys are "Real Time" just because you offer a basic websockets implementation and positioning your offering as anything that compares to Meteor is a sham. You don't have real time. You have web sockets that anyone can trivially hook up with NPM. You're undermining Meteor's exhaustive real time functionality when you say that. You are also tricking would-be users who don't know any better. They will show up using your framework, have extremely limited (basically non-existent) real-time functionality, and never know what they would have missed had they looked more into Meteor.

Meteor offers a slew of real time features, propagating real time observation of the database up the stack through your webservers to your views, all functioning seamlessly with feature-packed APIs to query your data and make sure everything is kept up to date.

But I think you know this. Capitalizing on your juxtaposition next to Meteor only makes you look bad to someone that actually uses Meteor. You're trying to convince people who haven't used Meteor--and perhaps don't have much experience when it comes to real time--that Feathers is remotely close of an option if you have real time needs. It's not. And most likely a few months from now you will be using the open source--and decoupled from Meteor--Reactive GraphQL (Apollo) project they are developing as the basis for your real time functionality. Only at that point will you be able to claim your real time--but that's beside the point.

You've been around for years, and now your framework is just "a few hundred lines of code"?? That's because you're likely taking the marketing value of having been in the game for a few years (though minimal value compared to claiming you come remotely close to competing with Meteor), and using the name "Feathers" to back your latest reincarnation where your mix-n-match a hodgepodge of NPM libraries that anyone can easily do. Sorry you had to throw away a bunch of code--I know how that goes--but call it what it is instead of all this dishonesty: your latest NPM boilerplate. The newer and humbler Meatier boilerplate offers more realtime than you do!: https://github.com/mattkrick/meatier . And its author doesn't attempt to presume it's anything more than a highly useful boilerplate.

THESE GUYS (FEATHERS) HAVE NO REAL-TIME OFFERING, EVERYONE. DON'T BE FOOLED. If Real Time is what you want, these guys are not it. I find The dishonesty of their marketing unappealing and I hope anyone reading this does too. They are capitalizing on the "Meteor" name and its deep association with "real time" functionality, when in fact they are nothing like it.

[nailer]

Ouch. Meteor's data syncing is great, but it's not a mandatory part of real time.

That said, from their web site:

> Feathers is completely open source and is community supported, whereas Meteor, although open source, is venture backed and has raised $31.2 million to date.

A license is either Open Source (it meets the OSD) or is not. There is no 'completely open source'. I think Meteor's overvalued too, but you're not 'more' OSS than Meteor is.

[ekryski]

All of the docs are from https://github.com/feathersjs/feathers-docs using the amazing Gitbook. We are totally open to PRs if there is something that is incorrect or could be worded better :-)

[nailer]

PR sent. https://github.com/feathersjs/feathers-docs/pull/74

[ekryski]

Sorry you feel that we are being dishonest. It's definitely not intended. I respectfully challenge the claim that Meteor is currently real-time and Feathers is not. Just because we're not (currently) doing oplog tailing on Mongo and data diffing does not mean Feathers isn't real-time, instead we sync up things at the service layer.

We do have plans to (optionally) support "real-time" all the way from the database as well and we are currently working on something similar to Apollo and Falcor. Can't do it all at once with no financial support.

If you feel things could be better and are interested in helping us achieve what you think is a more justified stance on being "real-time" then by all means PRs are more than welcome!

[faceyspacey]

It's misleading and almost innacurrate. But yes I understand how time consuming and painstaking it is to build basically anything substantial. I'd just do more with realtime before u go comparing yourself to Meteor. Also the meteor features you listed are still only maybe 25% of all the realtime functionality Meteor has over Feathers. Fortunately things are changing thanks to GraphQL, so you will be able to offer thorough real time soon, but the rest of NPM will be able to access it just as easily. The NPM ecosystem has done a phenomenal job of killing the need for frameworks. I myself am basically a Meteor refugee. It's awesome, but you just don't need it or any framework anymore if you are a serious developer building professional apps.

[dcwca]

No need to get worked up.

As a counter-point, I have built "real time" web apps and Feathers was exactly what I'm looking for and matches my mental model for what that word means.

[niallobrien]

This is complete nonsense. You clearly haven't used Feathers. I can assure you that Feathers does indeed provide realtime functionality and have code examples to back up that statement.

[faceyspacey]

It has something close to 1% of the real time features meteor has. No doubt u have plenty of code to make up for that missing 99%.

[dangoor]

My issue wasn't with the idea of Feathers being an alternative to Meteor... it was with the original title which made it sound as if Meteor wasn't open source. It wasn't even a defense of Meteor, just a clarification of the title.

[Luyt]

What happens when the connection between the server and a client is broken? Will Feathers automatically (and invisibly) restore it?

[dcwca]

Yes, Feathers relies on either Socket.io or Primus (your choice) for the websocket interface, both of which provide auto-reconnect with back off out-of-the-box.

[ekryski]

I will also follow up with, although we mention it on the site, we realize there may an implied bias with the comparisons being on the Feathers site and if anything is incorrect or out of date we want to correct it. So issues and PRs are very welcome!