Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by CatDevURandom 4123 days ago
I feel like Meteor has been floating along for along time without significant traction beyond toy-projects. I remember seeing (I think?) Meteor at Djangocon and being impressed, but feeling like using it was an all or nothing decision given the pace of how quickly front end development was -- and still is -- changing.

A year or two later I looked at it for a small project but saw it was still exclusively tied to mongoDB.

Are there any major sites or businesses using meteor?

5 comments

I wouldn't call it all or nothing these days. If you don't like Blaze (Meteor's reactive front end package - https://www.meteor.com/blaze) You can exclude it and use another one - here's an example app the React team created https://github.com/reactjs/react-meteor
I know it might be bad form to link to a video of something I built, but I don't think that the work I've been doing for the last 18 months amounts to a toy project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v5nSxchwRA

Nor is Respondly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTkV3MW9mKA

I think the problem with Meteor was mainly that it started punching above its weight too soon. All these fancy demos and then you looked under the covers and it was... basically irresponsible from a security standpoint to ship anything that mattered on Meteor. I know that's been fixed now, but so many people like myself never gave it a second chance. And I wonder if it will ever really get that second chance or if something like it is what will get attention instead.

It's a cautionary tale about why you need to be very clear that your demo alpha isn't fit for general consumption yet. I think that, in the rush to get attention, the Meteor people didn't do a very good job of that. Therefore everyone who took a deep look thought they had uncovered a foul truth that Meteor wasn't what it was hyped to be. And they did. Because the people promoting it didn't talk about that.

How old is the release you're talking about? I started using Meteor about 18 months ago, and I don't have a clue about what you're referring to. Security has been a complete non-issue for every release I've ever seen.

---

> I know that's been fixed now, but so many people like myself never gave it a second chance.

But what's stopping you from looking now? Meteor security is great, and you should give it another look. One interesting bit: there are only 16 srp implementations listed on the srp page on wikipedia, and Meteor is one of them! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protocol

If you scroll down a bit on https://www.meteor.com/ you can see some quite nice featured apps.
Here is a nice list, but not all major sites: http://madewith.meteor.com/