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by alanning 4194 days ago
> Meteor.js is basically Ruby on Rails for Node.js and MongoDB...

As a long-time user of Meteor in production I have to say this is just about the exact opposite of how I think of Meteor. I'd encourage anyone interested to try out the simple tutorial [1] and glance over the principles behind meteor [2].

For my take on it, Meteor is great for "real-time" apps where user actions should be disseminated across a broad network quickly. It has helpful things like built-in latency compensation which make the end-user experience much nicer and the "database-on-the-client" is just glorious.

The most beautiful part of Meteor is that these features are provided for developers without us needing to make sacrifices or in most cases even change our way of coding. Latency compensation is purely controlled by whether a method is made available on both the client and server or just on the server. The client-side DB is automatically kept in sync with the actual back-end DB via a familiar pub/sub mechanism.

To me, these features (and the many others not mentioned) make Meteor much different than simply a "Ruby on Rails for Node.js".

[1] https://www.meteor.com/install [2] http://docs.meteor.com/#/basic/sevenprinciples