When Meteor is no longer commercially viable and runs out of venture capital brewed hype-juice everyone will jump to the Next Big Thing and companies that listened to their Meteor evangelist will have to furiously find someone to port from Meteor to ANYTHING so they can continue to build features and support new services.
Bless me with your downvotes Meteor zealots! I'll still be here when Meteor is has gone the way of Flash and ColdFusion.
As mentioned, it's open source and gaining traction. If MDG goes away, I see no reason why meteor could not or would not stand as a viable web framework.
Gaining traction because of the venture capital hype juice I mentioned.
There are lots of open-source and "viable" web frameworks out there.
People want Meteor because it makes a lot of promises regarding productivity, but (as the presence of this article and multiple comments prove) the real interest is in a framework that has money for continued development.
So without the financial backing Meteor is just another open-source web framework. Except if that happens, instead of just replacing it with Angular, Ember, Knockout, etc, you'll also have to replace the entire backend too!
I've already had to do this and while I enjoyed it in some ways and learned a bunch... I really don't think that my company enjoyed paying me to rebuild a platform that they already paid for because the Meteor evangelist they hired before me decided they wanted to be an overpaid consultant instead.
> People want Meteor because it makes a lot of promises regarding productivity, but (as the presence of this article and multiple comments prove) the real interest is in a framework that has money for continued development.
I can't speak for others, but the reason I find meteor interesting is because it's one of the only frameworks to address isomorphic javascript, and because it has some really interesting realtime features out of the box. The fact that it's backed by a team that has some venture funding (and therefore some runway to continue improving it) is a definite plus.
> So without the financial backing Meteor is just another open-source web framework.
I don't understand this point. Even _with_ the funding meteor is just another open source framework. Isn't it great that we have a number of open source framework options to suit different needs?
> I really don't think that my company enjoyed paying me to rebuild a platform that they already paid for because the Meteor evangelist they hired before me decided they wanted to be an overpaid consultant instead.
You haven't really explained _why_ you needed to rebuild it. Perhaps meteor didn't suit the use case for this project or perhaps you felt more comfortable/productive in another framework. You haven't really made a case against meteor or a convincing argument about why adopters would need to switch to another framework if MDG failed as a commercial business.
What about "isomorphic javascript" needs to be addressed? That was a term that almost seems invented as a problem for Meteor to solve. The fact that code in completely different environments (browser vs server) needs to look different is not something that needs to be addressed.
A) With financial backing Meteor is an open-source framework which MUST provide an ROI for those backers.
B) Read the comments, the reason Meteor is more hyped is because it is funded. The reason people use to justify the enormous investment in building a production app with Meteor is based on it being funded. Take away the funding and you take away a compelling reason to use it... so if that reason is removed after you have already invested, you have lost on your investment.
Meteor was not the right tool for the job, but good luck trying to have that conversation with a Meteor evangelist. Just like any other evangelist they're pragmatic when it suits their argument and dogmatic whenever it doesn't.
In closing, I'm not against Meteor as a tool. I love tools and I love a lot of the concepts in Meteor (not isomorphism, that is a fools errand).
What I don't love are people/companies that misrepresent themselves and put more money into sounding good than they do into actual being good.
My experience using Meteor was resoundingly negative and yet negative experiences are shouted down while positive ones are lauded. The "maybe it didn't suit your use case" only comes up when I show I'm willing to stick to my guns and articulate myself.
Want to convince me Meteor is really dedicated to being a great and lasting web framework and not just a cash grab? Why don't you put an article to the front page of HN describing the use cases that Meteor ISN'T good for?
You admit they exist, so why not, right? They could learn a ton about their product while being brutally honest about its limitations with the community they want to win over.
Of course, it'll never happen, because Meteor isn't really a community project to build the next best framework. It's an investment vehicle and no investor would ever willingly let doubt be shined on their investment vehicle.
But not all of us are using Meteor for work. I just started using Meteor for a fun side project last week (after first banging my head against the still-a-work-in-progress ember-cli and ember-data), and I am having a grand time of it. It's amazingly intuitive, and I'm making great progress, mostly because they already handled so much of the grunt work already.