[joshburgess]

Is DDP or Meteor really needed though? Couldn't you easily set this up with RethinkDB using its Changefeeds killer feature for real-time + socket.io along with whatever other library/frameworks you want to use without ever touching Meteor?

[xbryanx]

Yes, you totally can, but I found running one command:

curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh

so much quicker (in the short term and long term) than reading a myriad of tutorials and then bashing my head against this configuration of several products for multiple weeks to get what Meteor provides as part of a single maintained and updated system.

[btown]

If you're willing to wait for a client-server round trip to visibly see your changes, then sure. Otherwise, you'll need a way to temporarily (optimistically) change your in-browser data model with the updates while waiting for the server to commit your changes, then figure out a way to reconcile the server commit of v2 while you might have done v3 on the client in the meantime... Optimistic updates are not at all trivial. Meteor has a ton of code that basically runs an in-RAM version of MongoDB and keeps it in sync with the server.

[djmashko2]

It turns out to not be that simple. My coworker Slava has a talk about exactly this question: http://info.meteor.com/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-real-t...

(I work at Meteor)

[spinningarrow]

You'll still miss out on the client side optimistic updates.

I think the main benefit of Meteor is not that it's impossible to do what it does with other libraries/frameworks, but how easy it makes those things for you.