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by 013a 2999 days ago
We still use it, though we are phasing it out.

In general, its solid for its use cases, but you need to understand what its good at. Its pretty great for small apps, prototyping, hobby projects, etc.

There are a few things we learned that I'd share:

Use React. Should be obvious. Meteor's react support is pretty great.

Stay away from Meteor packages as much as possible. Its better to look for a similar NPM package and do the integration work yourself then to rely on the "magic sauce" that many Meteor packages use. The only ones I can really suggest using are the official MDG ones.

You don't have to use pub/sub to fetch data. You can absolutely fetch data through Meteor Methods in situations where real-time isn't important. Meteor methods are just simple request/response RPC. Pub/sub can become stupidly hard to reason about, though in simple applications can make your app seem really fast and responsive.

That being said, its got great integration with Apollo. If you start with Meteor, ignore all of the DDP stuff (pub/sub, methods, etc) and just build the API with Apollo, you wont regret it.

If you think you'll want to deploy a mobile app, maybe don't do Meteor. You still definitely can, but Meteor's semantics around the always-on websocket connection tend to severely hurt a mobile-first experience.

Today, I'm not sure I can recommend new projects go with it. That being said, I also feel like a normal GraphQL server on Node isn't "far enough" down the path that Meteor set. The JS backend world is still really far away from an AIO framework like Rails/Phoenix; Meteor is the closest we got, but its not the answer.

1 comments

You could check out http://vulcanjs.org/, we're trying to get it to be a "Rails for GraphQL/React".
^^ I did lots of research on whether Meteor was the right move for us. I ended up learning about Vulcan.js, which is developed by the Sacha who built the very popular Telegram on Meteor back in the day.

I have to say I'm impressed so far. Lot's of nice things to get one up and running quickly. But it's been thought about in a way that should allow you to mix and match the defaults it comes with in a modular way as your application grows.

With Apollo/GraphQL at its core and React on the front end it really does make a lot of sense given current trends and I'd urge anyone looking at Meteor to check it out. Great active Slack group too.

Is this another layer on top of node. It says you can metwor install?