[maxharris]

Meteor has gotten a hell of a lot better since I started using it (back in the 0.6.5 days about a year ago, in the fall of 2013). Performance and stability have improved dramatically, both on the client and server.

I've been working on several large projects, and the new things that Blaze has added (mutable, per-template data instances) have made my life a lot easier. The transition between each release has been very, very smooth. Now that it's possible to write sensible UI components, and 1.0 is very near, Meteor deserves your attention.

[sgarrity]

Can you elaborate on this statement? "Now that it's possible to write sensible UI components"

I'm curious what improvements you are referring to.

[maxharris]

http://docs.meteor.com/#template_instance http://docs.meteor.com/#tracker_autorun

Suppose you want to make a widget, such as a drop-down menu that lets you edit the currently selected item. To do that, you need a place to store the currently selected item id. Storing this in a collection is not desirable either. If you rely on session variables, you can't have more than a single instance of your widget running at a time because session variables are globally scoped.

Now with template instances, there's finally a way to store and retrieve that selected item id (or anything else, for that matter) in a way that's conveniently accessible within template helpers and event handlers on a per-template basis.