> It's not the only option but it's a damn good one.
I've been using Parse, is another good option in your opinion? I quite like it, especially as everything is available via REST so it is easy to use it with Elm
I'd personally avoid Parse as it's been shut down. I worked with someone who had inherited a Parse-based app last year and we had to do a fair amount of gymnastics to get it working smoothly. That was just my personal experience, though.
A good rule of thumb: if it works for you, use it. There's a lot of ballyhoo about keeping up with the tech Joneses which is mostly unnecessary. It's the most common excuse I see people using for not sitting down and just building their idea (we teach people how to build their own products at Clever Beagle). Tech always changes. If you're truly successful, at some point you will have to migrate to some new technology. Most concern about "blowing up" is just hubris disguised as optimism.
There isn't, hasn't, and will likely never be a permanent, perfect solution. Every single piece of technology has gotchas and idiosyncrasies. Use what you understand and makes you productive—the rest will take care of itself in time.
I like that it is open source, but the question is how well is it being maintained? Having said that one can self-maintain as I think it is NodeJS. That's what you'd have to do if you write your own Backend - so the only problem is how spaghetti like the code is.
It’s just Node.js. All of the Meteor-related code can be removed if you really wanted and just rely on the build system. Even if you had to do a port to a vanilla Node.js app, a large reasonably well-structured app might take a month or two tops to port.
Side note: frameworks don’t write spaghetti, developers do.
A good rule of thumb: if it works for you, use it. There's a lot of ballyhoo about keeping up with the tech Joneses which is mostly unnecessary. It's the most common excuse I see people using for not sitting down and just building their idea (we teach people how to build their own products at Clever Beagle). Tech always changes. If you're truly successful, at some point you will have to migrate to some new technology. Most concern about "blowing up" is just hubris disguised as optimism.
There isn't, hasn't, and will likely never be a permanent, perfect solution. Every single piece of technology has gotchas and idiosyncrasies. Use what you understand and makes you productive—the rest will take care of itself in time.