Show HN: Meteor, a realtime JavaScript framework

http://www.meteor.com

by geoffschmidt • 14 years ago

1386 322 14 years ago

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

Hey everyone! The four of us have been working very hard on this for the last six months, and we're excited to finally take the wraps off. Can't wait to hear what you think!

We've got a lot more stuff coming over the next few months, and if there are particular things you'd like us to do/prioritize, I'd love to hear about them!

zsherman• 14 years ago

This looks awesome! Nice work guys.

ernestipark• 14 years ago

Are you guys in Boston?

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

We visit a lot, but we all live in the Bay area these days.

Tloewald• 14 years ago

Looks very interesting ... This or something like it seems like the obvious "other shoe" for nodejs.

frankus3• 14 years ago

Does this work with something like Plates or Weld.js, or does it replace them, or does it shun that approach altogether?

janus• 14 years ago

Mind blowing. Feels very desktop-ey for a web application. The included deploy to cloud options are a huge plus!

Produce• 14 years ago

Things seem to go in cycles in computing (and life in general). We had a solid model for developing single user applications, then we dropped that in favor of multi-user (web) applications. Now it's going full circle and we get the nice rapid development tools again. I wonder what the next cycle will look like.

fleaflicker• 14 years ago

Is anybody paying you to work on this full-time?

sbarre2• 14 years ago

Judging from the "About Us" page, it sounds like these guys are "financially independent" enough already...

pazimzadeh• 14 years ago

They must have a good amount of money to have that URL.

OzzyB• 14 years ago

Well, no one has mentioned anything about the awesome domain yet, so I guess I'll have to -- meteor.com -- great domain guys :)

gotrythis• 14 years ago

Meteor is a horrible name for a programming language. Meteor's crash and burn! lol.

jbigelow76• 14 years ago

I was wondering how they scored that one too.

iamgopal• 14 years ago

Can you relax server side requirement a little bit ? Lots of people, including me, want to run such app on google app enigne which do not support node.js yet.

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

It's been built using Node.js. How on earth are they supposed to 'relax' their dependance on it?

Aftershock21• 14 years ago

looks amazing..hope to see this take the position of Rails!

chefsurfing• 14 years ago

Bravo! The earth has been waiting for this. ;)

AdleyEskridge2• 14 years ago

This looks fantastic. I genuinely got giddy watching the screencast!

If I were to use Meteor for a partially closed source app earning around $1000 per month, how much could I expect to pay you? From the FAQ:

> If the GPL doesn't work for your project, get in touch (contact@meteor.com) and we will write you a commercial license to your specifications.

olalonde• 14 years ago

How is your application distributed? If it's a web app that you run on your own servers, GPL doesn't apply to you (only AGPL would).

zavulon2• 14 years ago

I love everything about Meteor so far, except for this.

This is no way to answer such an important question that most potential users will have - let's face it, there's a lot of people who will want to use this for open source, but a lot more who will want to use this for commercial apps. To ensure Meteor's wide-spread acceptance, you need to clearly answer this question on FAQ page, and not with "we need to have a conversation".

zmmmmm• 14 years ago

Ugh, I didn't even consider that a (partly) client side framework would have been GPL. Unless they come out with a very clear, simple and friendly commercial license it pretty much kills meteor for all practical purposes.

(To be clear, it's not that I begrudge the author's their right to license it how they want. I simply think frameworks like this are too central and important to have any uncertainty about licensing associated with them.)

tjogin• 14 years ago

I haven't been this impressed since DHH showed off Rails in 2004.

drudru112• 14 years ago

great launch - most of the stuff that was out there just didn't do it for me. I've done lots of app development before and the new JS frameworks were pale in comparision.

You guys have done a great job at making a true reactive system that doesn't burden the developer with complex binding/event systems. I also like how you guys have avoided the persistent store impedance mismatch :-)

overall, i'm excited to try this out. great work.

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

"Avoided" by, well, reimplementing MongoDB in JavaScript, but it's totally worth it :) And not as many LOC as one might expect.

Anyway, thanks much for the support :)

phpfour• 14 years ago

Simply WOW...I'm really blown seeing the screencast...keep up the great work!

huskyr• 14 years ago

Impressive! I was blown away by the fact that you don't need callbacks and events for the DB operations. Can't wait to dig in the code and see how you guys managed to make that work :)

rabidsnail2• 14 years ago

"You can use the database api on the client!"

Does that freak anyone else out? Where are they doing permissions checking? Who can run what database commands under what circumstances?

dbuxton• 14 years ago

From the docs (http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_collection):

"Currently the client is given full write access to the collection. They can execute arbitrary Mongo update commands. Once we build authentication, you will be able to limit the client's direct access to insert, update, and remove. We are also considering validators and other ORM-like functionality."

So just for toys for the moment. Still, very cool...

famousactress2• 14 years ago

Right. But as soon as you have this ability, don't you quickly turn off insert/update? then you throttle/contain reads... So in the end, do we benefit from having a client side database connection? I'm struggling to put together a real-world use case for one that isn't irresponsible.

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

insert/update/remove are actually just "newbie helper" shortcuts on top of the underlying latency-compensated RPC mechanism (which is documented under 'Meteor.methods'.)

Once the auth branch lands, you'll have two choices.

One options is, you can turn off the shortcuts entirely, and write a method for each scenario where the client would be allowed to write to the database. This gives you the same security model as a REST API.

Or, you can register an authorization-check hook with insert/update/remove, so you can vet each write and decide whether to allow it or reject it. This might work well with an ORM where you've marked some fields as writable, and some as protected.

stelford• 14 years ago

Urm. Yeah. It scares the ba-jesus out of me. The first thought when I heard this "killer feature" was, 'well, there goes security out the window'.

Stupid hypnic jerk question perhaps, but, how's it deal with injection attacks ? is this left upto the javascript programmer to make sure strings are "safe" ? I almost dread the answers.

underwater• 14 years ago

The screencast showed they were using Mustache for templating. That should prevent XSS.

saurik• 14 years ago

Shared scratch databases with no thought to security seem to be the hot new thing these days ;P. CloudMine, Firebase, Parse, StackMob... people seriously seem to think it is perfectly normal to throw their public /and/ private API keys into their projects... I mean, check out this tutorial from StackMob:

https://stackmob.com/platform/help/tutorials/ios_sdk

lacker• 14 years ago

Parse makes an effort to get security right. You don't use your private API keys in the client. Instead, there is an access key specific to the mobile client, and its access is restricted in several ways.

See https://parse.com/docs/data#security for more details.

jumper2111• 14 years ago

Agreed - there should be some discussion on how auth credentials play into all of this.

jaredsohn• 14 years ago

Interesting (and smart) that they post to Hacker News a couple of days prior to the launch of Firebase (which provided the realtime functionality used by MMO Asteroids and has been active at hackathons.)

jamest• 14 years ago

(Co-founder of Firebase here)

We know the Meteor guys well and are really excited about what they're building. It's very complementary.

We're both advocating a new paradigm in software development and the faster it comes the better.

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

I love Firebase. We were in their preview and they were in ours. It would make a lot of sense to use Firebase as the realtime database layer behind a Meteor app. Maybe it could be as easy as "meteor add firebase" :)

chime• 14 years ago

Just watched the entire demo. First time I heard two people present a product together - definitely makes it a lot more interesting and much less monotonous. After the first 30seconds, I went "pfft, live reload isn't new." But I'm glad I stayed till the very end because it is indeed so much more. It looks very promising, especially if you offer app hosting of some kind (or make it easy on Heroku etc.)

I am curious about the security aspect of writing to DB directly via the client but I'm sure you've thought of it. I love the 'add less', 'add coffeescript' feature. Can't wait to try this out soon.

EdisonW• 14 years ago

Yea, that was my first concern as well. Going around the typical models and straight to DB sounds dirty. :) Can't wait til I get home and try it out. Love the synchronous calls and how it synchronizes between screens, wonder how it scales up though.

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback about the beginning of the demo. We had a really tough time with the site and the video because the people who are interested in frameworks like Meteor come from a lot of different backgrounds. Some people have written half a dozen Backbone applications and have written their own highly scalable node.js cache invalidation servers, while other people have suggested that we take the word "REST" off the homepage because it's confusing to new developers.

It's tough to find a pace that holds the attention of the experienced people while not losing the people that are new to web development.

loceng• 14 years ago

Don't shy away from opportunity to teach. Just make sure you show it as a link, perhaps that means a simple popover explaining in simple terms what REST means.

nacker• 14 years ago

Amazing stuff! Would 'add pyjamas' (pyjs.org) be possible in future for those of us who prefer to generate their Javascript from Python?

davidcann• 14 years ago

Is there a built-in way to execute different code on the server, such as proprietary business logic, custom authentication, non-cross-domain APIs, etc?

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

Certainly! Take a look at Meteor.methods. That lets you define a method that the client can call without necessarily having the source. (If you give the client the source it will be able to do predictive latency compensation. But you don't have to. Or you can give the client a "stub" implementation that just inserts some placeholder records, while the server goes off and moves the forklifts around your warehouse over CORBA, or whatever.)

fruchtose• 14 years ago

Just to hear it explicitly, does this library allow the client to call a server-side function without the end user ever seeing the source of the server-side function? That's my biggest concern, especially with the emphasis in the video on, "The client can access the DB!"

nikic• 14 years ago

Consider my mind blown. This is awesome.

tlrobinson3• 14 years ago

Neat. Sounds a bit like Asana's Luna: http://asana.com/luna/

beggi2• 14 years ago

I thought so too, one of the founders was an employee of Asana.

tlrobinson3• 14 years ago

Well that explains it. Also, David Greenspan from AppJet/Etherpad.

iamjpg• 14 years ago

I keep picturing HackerNews being rewritten with Meteor so I can watch up-votes in realtime.

Seriously though, Meteor looks incredible and I can't wait to mess around with it! Awesome work.

grayrest• 14 years ago

Lots of smart design choices. I have equivalent bits and pieces scattered all over the place that I've been meaning to put together to get the "wow" that this package delivers. Kudos for actually making it happen.

beggi2• 14 years ago

This looks extremely interesting, and reminds me a bit of Lunascript (http://asana.com/luna/). I'm very interested in who is paying for the development? I notice that there's no big tech company behind this and from the contact page I can see Meteor Development Group has an office in downtown San Francisco. So do you have any info on what the plan is regarding monetization?

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

Well, I am one of the Meteor devs, and I used to work at Asana :) Luna is an astonishing codebase, and Meteor is a small fraction of it in sophistication and functionality. But we think there's room for a lighter weight framework for the masses.

Monetization: We're still figuring that out. For now, we just want to see what people do with it. We think a lot about companies like redhat and mysql, and how they have been successful while building open ecosystems.

luigi2• 14 years ago

This feels to me a lot like how Rails felt back in 2005. A fundamental leap forward and an understanding of where web technology is going.

I haven't felt that way about Node.js or even its higher-level frameworks like Express or Batman. This feels like "The One", even though I've been absorbing the docs and screencasts only for the last 20 minutes.

kgosser2• 14 years ago

Completely agree. I thought Backbone was the "missing piece", but this really is it.

Edit: to clarify I specifically meant a front-end tool to help me leap a level in personal development skill.

alttab2• 14 years ago

In my gut I was thinking "Great, another JS framework." I watched the video and was very impressed. And I consider myself a server guy.

cfontes3• 14 years ago

I am sorry but there is no way to compare backbone with this one( but it looks very nice, too ), they aim at different things.

I am using backbone for a while and it's backend agnostic which is great !

This one have more resemblance to knockout.js( I am talking client side) and it's MVVM design, backbone doesn't even try to approach that problem.

jguimont• 14 years ago

Backbone is almost at the top of the javascript toolkit levels. Let's put it in perspective:

- backbone - jquery - meteor <- the low level of the high level :)

You use meteor as a foundation to build your application as backbone is more or less your application itself. Think "CoreFoundation" vs "AppKit" kind of difference.

AdleyEskridge2• 14 years ago

I somewhat disagree. I want to preface my post by saying I'm smiling ear to ear—I loved the screencast, and I look forward to using this tomorrow on a project I've been thinking about for a while.

Here's my concern: If I use Meteor as it is intended, and I also want a my application to have API, I'll have to re-implement all of my logic server-side[1]. This seems like a step back, unless I'm misreading things.

I'd love for the Meteor team to address this. Does Meteor make writing APIs easier?

[1]: I'm aware that much of the "client-side" code is executed server-side too, but that's due to Meteor's magically transparent client-side framework.

ollerac• 14 years ago

I'm not sure about Meteor, but you may want to look into SocketStream. Last time I checked they were very interested in making web APIs easier to develop.

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

Hey, one of the Meteor authors here. Meteor's architecture makes it super easy to make an API. It's one of the advantages of building your architecture around sending data around rather than HTML.

We couldn't go into everything in the video (it was already too long!), but the piece you're missing is Meteor.methods(). This lets you define methods, which are functions that the client can invoke on the server by calling Meteor.call(). If you choose to also ship the code for these methods to the client (it's optional) then you'll get full latency compensation like we talk about in the video. (This means that Meteor can latency-compensate arbitrarily complex functions, like "read this record, then add 2 to X if this field is false, else create a new record Y.")

In fact, every Meteor app already has an API :) Your Meteor client can connect to any other Meteor server by calling Meteor.connect(), and can then subscribe to any realtime datasets that that server is publishing, or invoke any methods available on that server. This is done with a protocol called DDP, but we could map DDP to REST fairly easily.

zinkem• 14 years ago

This is built with Node.js.

From the docs: "A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container..."

luigi2• 14 years ago

I know. I meant that Node.js itself wasn't the fundamental leap that this is. And previous frameworks based on Node haven't attained "The One" status either.

tlrobinson3• 14 years ago

I think he's saying this could be the Rails of Node.js.

Node.js is very low level and is more analogous to Ruby than Rails.

kika2• 14 years ago

I felt that way when I first learned about Kanso JS.

wonnage• 14 years ago

Interested to see how they'll handle file uploads, authentication, etc. Especially authentication, seeing as clients have full access to the database right now.

flav0ur• 14 years ago

Great. I'm sure realtime web frameworks will be the future of node.js and the entiry web itself. However, I do have some concerns. Opening my Databse via the web? Neeh, this is one thing not clear in the video.

P.S.: You should provide your cli via npm. Go and register the name before someone else do. (It's not taken currently http://search.npmjs.org/#/meteor)

kilowatt• 14 years ago

Cool stuff! Really like the template handler that "notices" which attributes you're interested in and registers listeners for you. Is that implemented with a proxy "this?" or with actual Javascript parsing? gulp

Any reason the GitHub link isn't above the fold? That's the first thing I looked for...

I'd also be curious to know if any of the live reloading stuff was inspired by Brett Victor's "Inventing on Principle?" Something about tools that let you create "live" seems to be in the air.

md224• 14 years ago

Wasn't there a Backend-as-a-Service platform released recently for use with Backbone.js? Does anyone remember what that was? Seems like we're seeing a new wave of "front-end only" application frameworks coming out...

EDIT: oh yeah, Backlift! (http://www.backlift.com) This is definitely an interesting trend.

defeated2• 14 years ago

The live demo is here: http://colors.meteor.com/

Seems to have a minor glitch with unicode characters? When you do Colors.remove() everything goes away, but the entries with unicode all come back? Somewhat strange...

Interesting tech, but db access from the client scares me to no end, call me a curmudgeon I guess.

shashashasha• 14 years ago

Performance on that url also seems to be super slow right now with a lot of people hitting it. Curious to see how Meteor handles loads, it's really exciting stuff.

defeated2• 14 years ago

I think that someone might've gotten clever and done something like, while (true) { Colors.insert(...); }

On a related note, they took it down now.

wicknicks• 14 years ago

Wow! This is amazing. Though not entirely new, I love the idea of syncing database content with web content. They seem to have gotten it right!

equark2• 14 years ago

Is GPL really viable for a web framework? The Free Software Foundation has consistently held that linking to GPL code (not LGPL) is derived work.

skore3• 14 years ago

[[citation needed]]. From what I remember, the FSF is pretty consistent in saying that deriving from GPL code is derived work. If your linking constitutes a derivation (a common example would be a database handler that you adapt to your application after you've loaded it) then it is a derivation. If you just loosely call it, it is not.

aaronblohowiak• 14 years ago

Golden, Bernard (2005), "Chapter 3. Open Source Risks", Succeeding with Open Source, Addison-Wesley, p. 44, ISBN 9780321268532

You appear to be confusing GPL with the "GPL With Linking Exception" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception

equark2• 14 years ago

Meteor packages all the JS together and minifies it. That's clearly linking.

chc• 14 years ago

I think Meteor actually has the opposite problem: Running a web app is not generally considered to be distribution, so as long as you aren't actually giving the source code to anybody else, the requirements of the GPL don't apply to you. (IANAL, but this is my understanding.)

bryanh2• 14 years ago

This is correct, and is the exact reason the AGPL was created (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License): to close the "not really distributed" loophole in GPL.

ewang1• 14 years ago

Wouldn't this only apply to the server side code of the app? If any proprietary code is also bundled and distributed client side by Meteor then I think the GPL provisions would apply.

kragen4• 14 years ago

Meteor runs on the client, not the server. If the server sends the code to the client so that the client can run it, the code is being distributed to the client. Better make sure that you have a link to the un-minified version of your site's JS if you minify it and use Meteor, and of course don't try to restrict your users from studying, copying, modifying, and redistributing your site's JS.

davidroetzel2• 14 years ago

IANAL and my understanding of the GPL in a web context is at best fuzzy, but I still believe the following to be true:

The majority of application code is run on a user's browser. This means it is distributed (or conveyed) to the user. Thus, you have to offer every user of the app a possibility to obtain the unobfuscated source code.

But there is more: The GPL requires you to offer not only some JS files, but everything needed to run the application. This would include everything on the server-side as well.

Sencha's take on this might also be interesting in this context: http://www.sencha.com/legal/open-source-faq/

They have been using a GPL dual-licensing model for their products for quite some time now and I suspect they consulted more than one lawyer.

pbreit2• 14 years ago

Except that the nature of Meteor is that the source code is always being distributed out to the client. Meteor is quite a bit different from the usual web framework where all the code is run on the server.

ig14• 14 years ago

Ditto. The whole point of the LGPL is to allow linking code not to be GPL'd.

It pretty much kills the usefulness of this project.

kragen4• 14 years ago

It kills its usefulness for proprietary software, unless you're willing to pay the Meteor guys whatever they ask for a license. But I'd like to point out that there's actually a lot of software out there that isn't proprietary, and Meteor looks like a dramatically better way to write it.

cfontes3• 14 years ago

This is a major point...

If I use it in my project and after a while I want to charge for the service and I don't distribute all my code, am I in trouble? if yes, I forecast a slow and steady walk into the event horizon for this nice little thing.

sciurus2• 14 years ago

It doesn't matter if you charge for the service or not. As soon as you allow someone to access your project, you have to make the source code available to them.

rads• 14 years ago

"If the GPL doesn't work for your project, get in touch (contact@meteor.com) and we will write you a commercial license to your specifications. We are happy to be flexible. What's important is that we have a conversation about how you are using Meteor, and what support and further development you need, so we can keep everyone in the community on the same page."

http://meteor.com/faq/how-is-meteor-licensed

davidroetzel2• 14 years ago

tl;dr I do not think that the GPL is suitable to build an open source community around a web framework.

With the current licensing it looks a lot like they are pondering a dual-licensing business: Offer a GPLed version for free and charge for commercial licenses.

Since the product seems to be very promising and since the GPL is not suited for many use-cases (web startups, freelance work for clients and even many inhouse developments), this might actually work.

Being a developer myself, I see nothing wrong with a bunch of other developers wanting to be paid for their work. If this is really how they want to play it, I wish them all the best. (If this really is the case, I find the current copy on their website a bit misleading, though).

On the other hand, if their goal is to establish a vibrant open source community around meteor, then I think they are on the wrong track.

To accomplish that you need to have a low barrier of entry for a) users of your product and b) contributors to your project.

The GPL, in the case of a web-framework that blurs the client-server divide, sets the bar quite high for both groups:

a) Other commenters seem to agree with me that every app developed with a GPL'ed meteor has to be put under GPL as well. The implications alone might drive some people away from using meteor, but even having to think about those things upfront can be discouraging. Some people do not like the GPL, some may not be able to work with it and some may simply want to be able to choose the license for their work themselves.

b) If they are offering a commercial license, it will not be easy for them to accept outside code contributions. They need to establish some legal documents (Contributor Agreements, maybe Copyright Assignments) and a process for accepting contributions. This makes it a lot harder to contribute than simply sending a pull request. They cite the MySQL business model as something they closely studied. MySQL has a particulary bad reputation for not accepting outside contributions. And this is mainly due to their dual-licensing model.

I strongly believe that Ruby on Rails became popular so quickly and still has an active community because of its liberal license (MIT).

Personally I am very excited about meteor and I wish that they reconsider using another license. It does not have to be MIT, even though that is what I would choose, but even LGPL would be better IMHO.

drudru112• 14 years ago

Totally agree. I don't mind contributing to their project, but i don't think every developer, client, entrepreneur wants to open source their code.

Lazare2• 14 years ago

It depends what the Meteor team has in mind.

If they want this to be the next Django/Rails/Express/whatever, where a large and enthusiastic community both uses and develops the product then the answer is fairly clear: No, this is not a suitable license.

If their idea is that it's an nominally open source project where all control and most development takes place inside the originating company, and the community mostly just pays license fees then: Sure, it's a great license.

Longer clarification: Django is licensed under BSD, Rails and Express under MIT. Why? Because these licenses allow me to use these frameworks for my own webapps, without making the entire client/server code base available. I can toss together a Rails-based contacts manager, or a Django-based todo list app, and let people sign up, and even charge a monthly fee, and NOT have to give the code to the entire app out.

Someone else linked to Sencha's discussion of the GPL and JS webapps, and it's highly relevant: http://www.sencha.com/legal/open-source-faq/

In short, as long as Meteor is under the GPL, I can use the framework for free, but I cannot let anyone use a webapp I create with it without giving away all the source code. Which means that I'm very unlikely to actually install and try Meteor on my next project. My choices are basically "ignore Meteor" and "pay a license fee to the devs". Meteor is awesome, and probably well worth the license fee (whatever it might be), but it's fairly obvious that this is a huge limitation on the frameworks potential for adoption.

(It's worth noting that both Django and Rails were actually developed for a project, and then released under permissive licenses, because the framework wasn't the product, and the dev teams didn't need to try and monetize it. Meteor is the product, and the dev team does need to monetize it. And, again, Meteor looks awesome! So I can fully understand why they chose GPL, and I fully support that choice! But it is worth noting the consequences of that.)

kragen4• 14 years ago

In the twenty-five or so years of the free-software movement, we've built the Internet and the World-Wide Web; made the Encyclopedia Britannica obsolete by producing something dramatically better; built history's most portable operating system, which now runs everything from most smartphones to most supercomputers, with contributions from hundreds of companies, including its biggest competitors, IBM and Microsoft.

But even after twenty-five years, there are still people who think they have to make a code base proprietary to make money on it.

I'm horrified.

What do you think will happen if you toss together a contacts manager or to-do list app and charge a monthly fee, and give out all the code, just as the Meteor devs have given out all their code to you? Maybe some of your users will decide to run the app on their own server and stop paying you. Or try to compete with you. But probably most of them will want to use the site operated by the app's primary developer. And all of your would-be competitors are just free R&D increasing the value of your site.

What's so terrible about making web apps that are free software?

dangoor• 14 years ago

In their FAQ, they mention wanting to keep the changes people make open for now, which is why they chose the GPL. If that's the case and they're not pursuing a dual license business strategy, I'd suggest that the Mozilla Public License 2.0 is a better choice. It's very explicit that the files that come in the distribution are the ones for which derivative works need to be under the same license.

If dual license is what they really want, I'm not particularly interested at this stage.

sciurus2• 14 years ago

MPL 2.0 does look like a good fit.

"The MPL has been approved as both a free software license (albeit one with a weak copyleft) by the Free Software Foundation and an open-source software license by the Open Source Initiative. The MPL allows covered source code to be mixed with other files under a different, even proprietary license. However, code files licensed under the MPL must remain under the MPL and freely available in source form. This makes the MPL a compromise between the MIT or BSD licenses, which permit all derived works to be relicensed as proprietary, and the GPL, which requires the whole of a derived work, even new components, to remain under the GPL. By allowing proprietary modules in derived projects while requiring core files to remain open source, the MPL is designed to motivate both businesses and the open-source community to help develop core software." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License

zzzmarcus• 14 years ago

The problem with licensing Meteor as GPL is that it creates a high level of uncertainty.

If I'm going to start a new hobby or side project, perhaps hoping that it'll get bigger someday, I still have no idea if, when or how it'll make money so it doesn't makes sense to contact Meteor to find out how much licensing is, but the doubt will always be there and as likely as not I'd just not use Meteor to avoid finding out too late that the commercial license terms are unacceptable for whatever I end up with.

There's also uncertainty about what exactly I can or can't do with a GPL licensed web framework. To some it's very clear that I'll only have to release my changes to the framework, to others it's very clear that I'd have to release the whole app as GPL. To me it's unclear either way and as long as that uncertainty exists it makes using it tough call.

If it's hard to justify doing a hobby project with those concerns, it'll be next to impossible to get buy-in on a new project at work. In fact, as cool as Meteor looks, and as much as I'd love to use it, I wouldn't even present it as an option.

I'd prefer pay for support or hosting or add-ons or whatever; as long as I know up-front what the costs are likely to be. I don't think a more liberal license will prevent the community from contributing back, Rails, Django, Node etc. being the obvious examples. I'd love to see Meteor take off and the devs obviously deserve to make money on it, but personally the GPL just feels like it's only huge downside to an otherwise very exciting project.

pbreit2• 14 years ago

This isn't just a web framework where all the code is on the server, Meteor code is always distributed (to the browser) so I wonder if GPL is a complete non-starter. It doesn't matter if you want to charge or not, all of your modifications on the server side would seemingly need to be distributed back out.

swah• 14 years ago

So many projects these days, I wish they had simple metadata like Stackparts projects:

    meteor
     - Is a: webframework
     - Depends on: node.js
     - Comparable to: backbone.js knockout.js rails django
     - Connects: ....

jonny_eh• 14 years ago

I predict we'll see "Looking for Meteor.js developers, minimum 5 years experience" ads in the next 6 months.

mathiasrw2• 14 years ago

Would love it :)

delano2• 14 years ago

This is a very uncool way to install something:

    $ curl install.meteor.com | /bin/sh

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

I am to blame for that. Here is our thinking on it:

- Though it "feels wrong" (definitely with you there), is it really any different from downloading an installer package and running it?

- You can just go to install.meteor.com in your browser if you want to see what the script does (or just leave off the | sh), which is arguably better than other installation mechanisms.

Curious to hear people's thoughts :)

collinjackson• 14 years ago

How about making it https://install.meteor.com?

moe3• 14 years ago

I'm chiming in here because it may still be early enough to stop you.

Do. Not. Require. Root. Not optionally, not sometimes, not "maybe". NEVER.

Your universe is ~/.meteor. Do not even think about touching anything outside that. It's taboo.

You clearly know what you're doing otherwise, so please get this one right from the start and save yourselves a lot of headache later on (cf. npm).

Install to ~/.meteor and provide the user with a small snippet to paste to their ~/.bash_profile ("source ~/.meteor/magic.sh").

cdmoyer• 14 years ago

I will admit that it's my preferred way to install things like this. I can look at it and see what will happen easily.

I will also admit to disagreeing with the poster suggesting that it should all go to ~/.meteor. I kind of hate that type of install... at least when I don't have an option. I don't want to install it multiple times for different users, and I don't like "system" software in my home directory, I like to keep my user data there and back it up more regularly that /usr/local which is all things I can reinstall in case of disaster.

I guess the ideal would be to ask the user.

Comment...

  # add to $PATH
  mkdir -p "$PARENT/bin"
  rm -f "$PARENT/bin/meteor"
  ln -s "$TARGET/bin/meteor" "$PARENT/bin/meteor"

This probably needs to check it $PARENT/bin is actually in the path, and maybe tell the user that they'll need to add it.

stuffihavemade• 14 years ago

Please provide an npm package! In addition to the security, uninstall and versioning problems mentioned by others, not every one runs Debian and Redhat. If you provide a node package, anyone who can install node can install meteor.

edit: Any by not every one, I mean me, running ArchLinux.

ghayes• 14 years ago

It's become all too common these days

sstephenson• 14 years ago

I've got just the tool for you!

https://github.com/sstephenson/gosh

WiseWeasel• 14 years ago

That's all fine and dandy until people start MitM injecting malicious shell scripts with 'YES' as their first line...

Kiro• 14 years ago

Why is it uncool?

delano2• 14 years ago

You're running a script that you've never seen on your machine with your user account. It's a dangerous habit at best. At worst you're exposed to poor code and man-in-the-middle attacks.

As someone else pointed out, it also makes versioning difficult.

DancingWolf• 14 years ago

It was a few years since I was "in" with the new things happening in the web-world.

But how did JavaScript come to be the new "cool" language? It got some horrible problems with object oriented stuff, some really strange bugs/features, and it's slow-ish.

I liked making cool stuff with JavaScript, but compared to something like ruby isn't this a step backwards?

I can see the advantages of this framework, but it still seems wonky.

exogen• 14 years ago

Ubiquity is one reason. Ultimately, the "horrible problems" and "strange bugs" just turned out to be "unfamiliar differences." Also, newer JavaScript runtimes (V8) tend to smoke other dynamic languages in speed tests: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang... – so it's not "slow-ish" so much as "really, really fast." ;)

cwsaylor• 14 years ago

Grab a copy of "Javascript: The Good Parts". It's a short read and goes over the parts of JS that don't suck.

kika2• 14 years ago

And then try coffeescript which just isolates you from the parts which do suck :-)

mcantelon• 14 years ago

>it's slow-ish.

Not compared to Ruby. ;)

>I liked making cool stuff with JavaScript, but compared to something like ruby isn't this a step backwards?

http://fingernailsinoatmeal.com/post/292301859/metaprogrammi...

nicklovescode• 14 years ago

Very impressed

joshmlewis• 14 years ago

Why do none of the linked demos work? :/

Leftium• 14 years ago

The demo links are randomly generated. The links are preceded by instructions to set up your own demos at these unique sub-domains.

mcmire• 14 years ago

I'll have to think of a use for this, but this definitely seems really interesting. I think working to make building web apps easier and faster is an awesome mission, so mad props to you guys, looking forward to see where this project goes.

atjoslin• 14 years ago

This is awesome :D

hbrundage2• 14 years ago

Congrats to the Meteor team: it looks amazing.

Questions:

- What's browser support like?

- Do you do synchronous AJAX to return results synchronously for DB operations on the client? It looked like newly created records' IDs were returned as soon as the creation code was executed.

- How do you track a reactive function's dependencies?

- Do you plan to make a run loop similar to Ender's to stage and order various recalculations and DOM updates?

ericingram• 14 years ago

One question: How did you get a hold of Meteor.com?

bryanh2• 14 years ago

Big props on stellar presentation. The code is impressive, but even better is their slick install, deploy, docs, screencast and examples.

This looks big. If nothing else, hopefully others will notice the code to support materials ratio. Its just as relevant for straight OS as much as it is for "businesses around GPL".

munaf• 14 years ago

Agreed. What struck me most was how much care they put into the presentation of the framework, docs, and videos.

I'm really happy to see so many developers taking UX seriously, even if it's just for other developers. Quite a nice trend I'm seeing with libraries/frameworks these days.

joshontheweb• 14 years ago

Very cool, this feels like the natural evolution of the realtime web. I am fearful that there could be too much 'magic' though. Have to play with it before I pass judgement.

zenocon2• 14 years ago

Looks nice. There are a handful of similar frameworks out there (e.g now.js http://nowjs.com/, socketstream https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream)...the trend seems to be toward heavy use of sockets in webapps.

I'm developing with socketstream right now, and I love it. I hope they are all successful.

juliennakache• 14 years ago

Love SocketStream too. I'll be exploring Meteor to see the differences :)

jcarden• 14 years ago

Interesting. I may be in love.

Geee• 14 years ago

Would it be possible to set it up so that the initial page load is completely static html served from cache? The page would then be updated when it changes, i.e pushed to client and new cache.

There's lots of overhead on both server and client side generating everything dynamically, especially on slow mobile clients. Testing it on fast machine on localhost creates visible delay in initial DOM update. On typical content/read-heavy pages it would make sense to always serve static pages as a fast as possible and update cache and client-DOMs on database write.

davej2• 14 years ago

I agree, I want to call the Meteor framework revolutionary, but this is the one thing that's stopping me. Unfortunately, it's only suitable for web applications (i.e. not content sites) because Google can't index it and permalinks wont work in browsers that don't support push state (IE 9 and below don't support push state).

In my opinion, this is the missing feature to make Meteor revolutionary in the process of web development.

jsdalton• 14 years ago

Looks like a solution for this is coming down the pipeline: http://www.meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html

pirateking• 14 years ago

I love Coffeescript and Backbone, but was on the fence about trying to build a Javascript only app using Node.js on the server. This looks a bit more interesting to me as it seems like a truly modern web framework, that may actually make web development fun again.

Freaking love the name too (admittedly a non-trivial factor to me when deciding whether to investigate new technologies).

gridspy• 14 years ago

I really like the look of Meteor. We're currently building the next version of our dashboards for Gridspy (http://www.gridspy.co.nz/). It would rock to have a solid real-time library at the core.

For us it needs to support our live data feeds, inter-operate nicely with our PostgreSQL db (via our own API?) and if possible take advantage of our existing django application.

Our rendered dashboards need to be seamless and fast. I've been leaning towards highly cached static data to ensure this.

charlieok• 14 years ago

Is there a blog with an RSS and/or Atom feed? That's how I generally try to stay in the loop on these things...

sleight423• 14 years ago

I had two knee jerk reactions. The first has been discussed already (client side DB access). The second has not.

Does Meteor have any opinions on testing? I didn't see anything from a quick glance at the docs.

I love the idea of tighter development cycles. But as a Meteor app grow in size and complexity, won't it still need a test suite to prevent regressions?

Eager to hear thoughts on this from the Meteor devs.

amirhhz• 14 years ago

That puzzled me, too, I started browsing the code and noticed there's not a lot of testing of the project code itself: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/tests

So I agree, it would be good to hear from the devs about their opinions and thoughts on testing. (Is there a chance that they think the "realtime-by-default" approach lessens the need for testing?)

I'm no testing zealot, but I've found writing tests useful and it would be a shame to be frustrated by that missing piece in an otherwise great project.

davej2• 14 years ago

http://www.meteor.com/faq/meteor-is-a-early-preview

debergalis• 14 years ago

We've actually written a lot of testing for the core framework packages -- those tests are in each package directory. Look for *_test.js files.

https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages/

You're 100% right though. We don't have a fully baked story yet for application level testing. It's something we're trying to push forward as soon as we can.

yread• 14 years ago

Yeah I also dread the tests that would be necessary to make sure that hot updates won't break anything.

follower• 14 years ago

It would be helpful if the phrase "simple DDP protocol" on the home page linked to a description of said protocol. :)

sbarre2• 14 years ago

Just watching the screencast and reading through the API for an hour or so is giving me real ideas for practical projects that I would never have tried before because of the sheer amount of "plumbing" required, but Meteor provides it already.

silverlight2• 14 years ago

This is very neat. I've been using Backbone + ShareJS[1] to do a lot of similar things for a current app I'm building. This is certainly nicer, though, with concepts like latency correction and support for keeping the user's changes in place whenever a template updates by only updating the specific elements that change (very cool).

A couple of questions for you:

1) What's the current and projected goal in terms of concurrency for the server? Is this going to be able to handle thousands of simultaneous connections? Is the Node server built on anything else like Socket.IO, or is it fully new and unique code?

2) How does this handle conflicts? ShareJS implements Operational Transformation[2] to attempt to smartly handle conflicting writes from multiple clients (used in Google Wave, for example). Does this just do a simple timestamp-based overwrite? If so, how far down the tree? I'm not familiar with MongoDB (sorry), but would it be at the object level? Or the property level?

[1] http://sharejs.org [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

guscost2• 14 years ago

It looks like David Greenspan (the guy who created EtherPad and then got hired by Google to work on Wave) is on the team so it's probably safe to assume that OT is a feature.

silverlight2• 14 years ago

A very good point :-). Just wanted to know what their "official" word is, since I didn't read about it in the docs...

EDIT: I see that they mention OT on the people page: http://www.meteor.com/about/people, so excuse my ignorance about the people behind the work...

benrahn• 14 years ago

For a not-full-time developer like me (I've picked up bits and pieces here and there) Meteor might just blow the doors open on what's within reach of my prototyping abilities.

(Full disclosure: I'm friends with most of the Meteor crew, very excited to see the wrapping come off!)

ph0rque• 14 years ago

Somehow, I feel that these guys are a YC company, but don't want to reveal it yet.

tstyle• 14 years ago

That would explain Garry Tan's photo and endorsement on the front page : )

flexterra• 14 years ago

Looks like the future

speg• 14 years ago

Looks cool! How will it fair if I try to make a mobile app via PhoneGap or similar?

keeptrying2• 14 years ago

Does it scale to really heavy javascript pages? Do you have any benchmarks on when it starts to breakdown in terms of performance?

Also have you built a "solid" production app with it?

mathiasrw2• 14 years ago

http://www.meteor.com/faq/meteor-is-a-early-preview

chrismealy• 14 years ago

"In Meteor, your server code runs in a single thread per request, not in the asynchronous callback style typical of Node."

So node's not a cancer now?

bbayer2• 14 years ago

+1, what about performance? Does this mean all server will be blocked while doing IO?

alexmic• 14 years ago

No, it says one thread per request, not single-threaded.

benmmurphy• 14 years ago

I thought they were using fibers (https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers) so much more scalable than threads but slightly worse performance than callbacks

javert• 14 years ago

Can't people find an alternative to the world "realtime" that hasn't already been used for 30 years to mean something entirely different? (As in, real-time systems, real-time operating systems, etc.)

I'm not trying to put down Meteor, I imagine it's great.

dreamdu5t• 14 years ago

Agreed. I prefer the term "auto-synchronizing" rather than "real-time."

GutenYe• 14 years ago

It remembers me of emberjs

level09• 14 years ago

Brilliant idea, I believe that HTML5 local storage will never work and perform well. these guys brought mongoose APIs to the client, this will bring along unlimited potential and possibilities.

yan• 14 years ago

Geoff & Co, this is wonderful!

(Not sure if you remember, but I met you in SF at one point a few years ago and we wandered around the downtown talking for a little bit. Was actually just wondering what you were up to)

tlear• 14 years ago

This feels like something big or perhaps something that will inspire something big. But you could probably avoid the database query straight in the client a distraction from an awesome presentation.

firefoxman1• 14 years ago

The live code update without the server restarting is really intriguing. What package is responsible for that?

chrisherring2• 14 years ago

What's the roadmap for supporting windows?

I tried to install meteor using cygwin and hit "Sorry, this OS is not supported yet.".

chrisherring2• 14 years ago

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10108840/meteor-and-windo...

daraosn• 14 years ago

I loved this project, nice job... just wondering, what if I want to protect my DB so people cannot change it through the browser console as shown in the video? (also this example http://colors.meteor.com/)

treetrouble• 14 years ago

This is the first use of server-side js that has made a lick of sense to me as anything other than an experiment.

I think in terms of security and flexibility the API may wind up being a lot more complex than it is now. Maturity aside, clearly an excellent idea and work so far...

polychrome• 14 years ago

Great work!

I have to ask, I know that Mongo is all the rage these days, but how quickly could you add MySQL support? I can already see several uses for this, but I need to tie into legacy systems.

In terms of security (say a dashboard), could you just disable the system from being able to modify the DB and just read it?

erichocean2• 14 years ago

Pairing Meteor with Blossom[1] would basically close the loop on writing high-performance mobile HTML5 apps.

(Blossom recently went full native on mobile -- the platform runtimes are no longer needed.)

[1] https://github.com/fohr/blossom

hbrundage2• 14 years ago

Can you expand on this? To me it seems like Meteor accomplishes the same thing as Blossom, on the web platform at least, except that it does HTML /templating instead of rendering to a canvas. I bet it would be hard to reconcile the two different frameworks ideas of what Observable or Subscriber/Subscription looks like as well.

erichocean2• 14 years ago

AFAICT, Meteor solves a different problem: eliminating the server-side of writing a JavaScript single-page application.

The auto-updating template stuff is cute, but unless your goal is apps that max out around the complexity of a todo list, there's a ton of performance pitfalls (c.f. Ember.js), especially in mobile browsers. A lot of apps are that simple though, so I don't want to knock Meteor (or Ember) here -- that's a useful niche to be in and anything that makes development faster/easier is great!

A Blossom app would simply use the server capabilities and data updating stuff in Meteor, but in the context of a normal, high-performance Blossom-based mobile UI with statecharts, hardware-accelerated surfaces and animation, and yes, GPU-accelerated Canvas rendering (although Blossom now supports old-style HTML/CSS views as well).

Mobile apps written with Blossom have virtually the same amount of resource control as a native iOS app, and to my knowledge, is the only mobile app framework with 100% JavaScript controls that can say that. (Appcelerator's Titanium is the other way to go – wrap the native controls with a JavaScript API.) Not to mention the ability to run on Android and iOS browsers from the same code base, or deploy via PhoneGap, or target desktop browsers or tablets with effectively native performance.

Meteor is really neat, I did something similar to at least the data syncing part two years with a tech I developed called HubSync, which kept a SproutCore datastore in sync across clients. The net effect was the same -- no server code, data stays in sync automatically, and you only ever dealt with the client API. (It could do a few other things, like still function offline, and was also shared nothing on the server side with Cassandra or BigTable -- I've seen serious problems with Mongo scaling in the past (yay, global lock!), and I have no idea what the offline story is for Meteor.)

But still, very cool tech overall, and the team looks like they've got some great ideas. Bravo!

cfontes3• 14 years ago

Do you plan to charge for it at some point? because for me it's not clear.

Is there a business model or just releasing it for people to use in their business and if improved contribute back ?

Because I cannot see anyone adopting it without those questions answered.

Anyway, nice thing you guys have build... keep it going !

aba_sababa• 14 years ago

I would love have all my node packages available to me...in the meantime, HTTP requests from the server would be much appreciated

yakko• 14 years ago

why is http://http://colors.meteor.com/ timing out?

norviller• 14 years ago

Why choose Mongo as the default Data store? Redis anyone?

zach• 14 years ago

Anyone want to speculate on the difficulty level of integrating Meteor with Cappuccino?

That combination seems like it could be spectacular, if it's at all possible.

avelis• 14 years ago

I know the install script is fairly easy but will this support installs via the homebrew package manager?

xxpor2• 14 years ago

One comment on the screencast, isn't encouraging people to do

    curl $URI | sh

a really bad idea?

beaumartinez• 14 years ago

No. You can have the same confidence it's legit as when you download an installer and run that. The bonus here is that you can load $URI and read the source before you even run it.

xxpor2• 14 years ago

Right, I guess I was just thinking of the opposite direction.

Usually I download something, look at it (more to see how it works, not security, but I digress) and then sh it.

rdl• 14 years ago

Congratulations -- I'd talked to you guys about what you were working on, but it looks like it's much more awesome than I thought.

CWIZO• 14 years ago

Note that the name "Meteor" is already used: http://meteorserver.org/ it's a comet server, so there might be some confusion here (I thought that this was the next version of meteor I linked to, at first).

Other then that: "holy shit" was the first thing that popped into my head after watching 2 minutes of the video. Excellent work guys!

dclowd9901• 14 years ago

Thanks for the trouble you guys have caused me. I'm gonna have to hose-whip my co-founder to keep this out of our project until it's mature enough.

angelohuang• 14 years ago

Could someone explain how it could work with Firebase?

jalada• 14 years ago

The whole Meteor website just refreshed for me while I was watching the screencast. Did they just push something? ;)

Edit: And now it's down. Thundering herd?

gsharma2• 14 years ago

I got very excited after watching that video. Meteor does a great job at hitting a lot of things a new web framework requires. However, I then viewed the source on meteor.com. It includes just a javascript and everything else is in that Javascript file.

Are all the apps going to be like this or just how they roll? Putting the HTML markup in a Javascript file not just breaks crawlers[1] (they are not indexed by Google) but also (I guess) not accessible to all sorts of users/browsers.

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/echo?q=http%3...

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

Meteor developer here -- we think it's super important to be able to serve static HTML when the situation calls for it (eg, crawlers.) Our architecture is designed to do this but we haven't had a chance to implement it yet. We have a lot of incentive to get to it soon, because it's no fun to be left out of Google :)

There's a bit more in the FAQ. Our approach is based on rendering the template as a string (it doesn't require building a DOM tree on the server and then serializing it.)

http://meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html

gsharma2• 14 years ago

Good to see that you are aware of this and working towards it. I'll keep an eye out for it, won't be able to use Meteor before that.

enobrev• 14 years ago

Very cool implementation, and fantastic site and video!

I grabbed the source to see what it would take to write a mysql plugin. As far as I can tell, it's fairly well tied into mongodb[1]. It seems this would benefit a great deal if the minimongo package[2] had some sort of interface to build to for custom data sources.

I would love to add mysql-livedata, and a mini-sql of sorts. Or maybe even a simple mini-orm with basic insert / update / delete / select methods and a more advanced "WHERE" syntax (SQL cousin to minimongo's selector magic). Obviously the real magic is in the livedata synchronization.

Regardless, this is very impressive. Thanks for putting this together!

1: As far as I can tell, the server won't even run without Mongo, at least according to this in server.js: `throw new Error("MONGO_URL must be set in environment")`

2: An incredibly cool browser-based implementation of the mongodb query api

geoffschmidt14• 14 years ago

Yeah, there still a few places where Mongo is hardcoded (the prototype assumed Mongo everywhere, and we've gradually factored out these assumptions.) Most of these places have to do with the code that automatically starts mongod for you when you type 'meteor' to run your app in development mode. I think all of the database assumptions have been factored out of livedata, but we'll only know for sure once we have a second database packaged :)

And yes a second time: to package a sql database, you would ideally have a 'minisql', a client-side cache with a sql-compatible interface. It's not strictly necessary though. There's no reason a DDP[1] dataset couldn't use a different database API on the client and the server (say, sql on the server, mongo on the client), but if you did this and you wanted latency compensation, you'd have to write all of your methods twice, once against each API.

I am really excited about having sql support, but we tried really hard to defer anything that wasn't absolutely necessary for release :)

[1] DDP is the protocol that livedata speaks between the client and the server. In Meteor, the client and the server mostly keep themselves at arm's length. The client doesn't know that the server is made with Meteor, just that it speaks DDP, and vice versa.

eliaskg• 14 years ago

First of all, the project is great! I think many of us have always dreamed of developing for the web in this way.

I also think they have to try to solve the "API Problem" at some point. Mobile apps are native and they will remain native for some time. Nobody wants to implement a web app with Meteor and re-write an API in a traditional manner.

But nevertheless this is a very interesting piece of work and I am thrilled to hear about updates!

melpomene• 14 years ago

How is security handled here when it seems like the client can write freely to the database? Are there any restrictions?

usamec• 14 years ago

there are no restrictions so far :)

keeptrying2• 14 years ago

A big part of the problem is building the community. Ie the right license and creating a core group that's more than just the employees of one company.

The tech looks great but I think the community is key for this to be adopted rather than anything else.

Rails nailed the community aspect and that's a big reason to its success.

neebz• 14 years ago

woha. this looks like what I build using Nowjs and Knockoutjs. (https://github.com/neebz/Real-Time-Notice-Board) plus mongodb access. Great stuff.

antihero• 14 years ago

How do you handle authentication and authorization in real-world apps?

Jebus• 14 years ago

GPL?! I don't even..

micheljansen3• 14 years ago

My first impression of this: wow. If Meteor is all it appears to be, this is nothing short of revolutionary.

My second reaction: what happens when the magic ends? When I was new to Rails, I really loved how easy it was to get started with scaffolding, a nice DSL for specifying relations, nifty form helpers. However, the first time I veered a little off the golden path and wanted to do something a little more complicated (that was not supported by the form helpers at that time), I ran into a huge wall. I found out that I actually had no idea how Rails worked. The magic had hidden all complexity from me before, and now the magic failed me and I didn't know where to start doing it on my own. Rails has matured a lot since then (it also dropped some of the magic in favor of more explicit behavior) and my understanding of the framework has grown with it.

Meteor looks even more magic to me. There is so much stuff happening. What if I plan to do a lot of dynamic updates and I want to defer live-updating because I am doing mass-updates? What if I need a hard division between client/server code? What if I want to share the backend with an iOS app or something? Can I use this to build an API? The documentation does not yet fully answer these questions for me.

danmaz74• 14 years ago

This was my first concern too. I didn't have time to study the documentation, but I hope it is easy to integrate custom solutions both around and on top of the magic whenever it's necessary.

csomar• 14 years ago

I can't upvote this enough. When I saw the screencast, I said "Good,we are looking for that". But I want to know how this work, and how I can hack the core. At some point of building my app, I'll need finer degree of control.

Lambent_Cactus• 14 years ago

The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/meteor/meteor

entropy_• 14 years ago

Joel Spolsky coined a term for this type of problem. The "leaky abstraction". See here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

mattbriggs• 14 years ago

It doesn't nessicarily need to be a leaky abstraction, in the case of rails (1) there was just a few miles between the path a beginner took and a pro took, which makes it real hard to stop being a beginner

XLcommerce3• 14 years ago

Such a great question. I spent a lot of time working with ExtJS having been lured in by all those great, straight out of the box components which had their own healthy dose of added magic. Fast forward a year or two and suddenly when I need to do anything that is non standard then reality kicks in.

I now need to buy-in to the entire (framework) mindset to progress which slows things down (because it doesn't necessarily match my own way of doing things).

Had the same experience with cakephp. All those freebies which eventually caught up with me.

Ties in well with the whole libraries vs frameworks debate. I'm now in the libraries camp.

I wonder if Meteor packages are decoupled from each other so that I can pick and choose which ones I'd like to use in my project.

Turns out there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

DougBTX• 14 years ago

> I now need to buy-in to the entire (framework) mindset to progress which slows things down

That's interesting, that idea could be folded into the technical debt metaphor.

So, by taking on a library or framework, I get a head start by just using it, but take on the knowledge-debt of not really knowing how it works. And when you get to the edge of what it can do, you either pay off the knowledge debt by learning how it works, or you throw the whole thing out and use a different library.

grannyg00se2• 14 years ago

I'd like to see some additional detail on this particular idea: "In Meteor, your server code runs in a single thread per request, not in the asynchronous callback style typical of Node. "

Seems one of Node's primary style advantages (async non-blocking style) has been eschewed.

mattgreenrocks• 14 years ago

At the end of the presentation, I noticed they depend on a fiber library.

jeromeparadis• 14 years ago

I wonder what's the performance hit of having a thread per request. I liked everything I say, but yes, having a single threaded node removes a lot of overhead.

jmarinez2• 14 years ago

Fibers take care of the "callback pyramid of doom" and makes it easier to write thick logic layers. However, it still would have the fairness and starvation issues that Node has with callbacks. It's still single-threaded and non-preemptive like "stock" node. I wonder how dependent Meteor is on Node? In other words, why Node? Is it for Node module compatibility? If it isn't, I'd love to see Meteor running on something else. I bet this thing would really fly on a lua backend with coroutines. Luvit.io?

mmobile• 14 years ago

Like the reference to Rails—so easy and at the same time so inaccessible.

In the earlier days without powerful frameworks I was really developing: figuring out which pattern/algorithm did the best job. Nowadays when working with frameworks I feel dumber and dumber—before thinking myself I just google API calls and put them together. I am not trying anymore because I don't know where to start and everything is already solved on Github. This magic feels sometimes so meta and boring because I am more into consuming specs, tutorials, screencasts just gluing things together instead of real programming.

Just diving into JS and Node.JS to get this "go-kart" feeling back. But I guess the more magic involved the faster the development and Meteor admittedly looks revolutionary.

ionforce• 14 years ago

Define "real programming".

spiffytech• 14 years ago

That's actually the sort of programming I like best! I don't want to care which sort algorithm is most appropriate for my dataset, I just want to call sort() and move on.

I love gluing things together that do the nitty-gritty stuff for me because it lets me focus on the big picture of making things happen, which is what I love about programming.

zedadex• 14 years ago

I know the feeling you're talking about. It's the difference between writing your own logic and simply learning what functions exist that someone created to handle the task you've been given.

10098• 14 years ago

It's like the industrial revolution. Long ago, things (like furniture) used to be made by craftsmen. They had to choose the materials, they had to get a picture of what the final product should look like. They used to work by hand, using only simple tools. It was hard. To become a skilled craftsman you had to be an apprentice for several years and learn a lot from your master.

Then came factories. Factories were super-effective, they produced a lot of things fast, and cheap too, and the level of skill required from a factory worker was in no way comparable to the skill of a proper craftsman.

I notice the same tendency in software development today - we, the software developers, are more similar to factory workers mindlessly sticking together parts than "ninjas" or "rockstars". Of course, the process of software development today is not entirely like a factory, but I sense it's moving towards there. And if it is, programmers will become something cheap and fungible. Imagine hiring illegal immigrants to write an iPhone app :)

clintjhill• 14 years ago

Another part about this kind of magic IMO is that it requires you to start from the ground up within this system. Otherwise the magic is either not doable or very hard. I know it's a tired argument but it's a reality - enterprise will have a hard time reaching for this kind of thing because it's so full-stack. Not easily separated without breaking all the magic. Maybe I've missed something about it, but it appears this way.

cristiantincu2• 14 years ago

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —Arthur C. Clarke.

For an user of a product/service, this is bliss. For a hacker, it might get tricky. Now, considering the fact that this is all open source, the huge wall you’re talking about is just a matter of perception. You’re free to debug and go with it as low level as you need.

micheljansen3• 14 years ago

Easier said than done. The code of Rails was also publicly available, but getting from a hello world app to diving into a hard core codebase such as that of Rails is a huge step. Understanding framework code is quite different from understanding app code as well.

nosequel• 14 years ago

"this is nothing short of revolutionary."

Oh FFS, this is not revolutionary. It is an attempt to wrap things in a friendlier package, while at the same time making something horribly insecure as a default install. Ruby on Rails did that a long time ago.

Better examples of revolutionary:

Manned Flight:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Flyer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11

In computers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#First_general-purpose_...

Or even in programming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)

Try not to throw words like "revolutionary" around.

micheljansen3• 14 years ago

I get your point, but just because you can name examples of other technological advances that are more revolutionary, does not mean that this (in its own small world) cannot be described using that term. Revolutionary (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) simply means "involving or causing a complete or dramatic change". A technology that dissolves the boundaries between client-side and server side development is a pretty big thing in web development and it may very well cause a dramatic change in how we go about cranking out web apps.

herdrick• 14 years ago

API question answered here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3826814

tete2• 14 years ago

Looks interesting, but..

  $ curl install.meteor.com | sh
  Unable to install. Meteor supports RedHat and Debian.
  Installation failed.

However the slow start description in their README works fine. Maybe this should be mentioned in the message above?

https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/README.md

Looks like an interesting approach. I always thought SocketStream would be the next big thing, but now I am uncertain. Nice that there are a number of frameworks though! :)

http://www.socketstream.org/tour

Oh, a CoffeeScript would be nice.

kodablah• 14 years ago

I still think SocketStream is the next big thing. The 0.3 release is moving along well and I have had fantastic success with it. The features touted by Meteor seem to already exist in SocketStream (template choice, server/client push/pull, DB choice) besides the "no server code part". It also works very well on Windows of course.

zenocon2• 14 years ago

I've been building a SocketStream app for a couple weeks now, and this was my thought too -- plus it has other, important stuff done (e.g. authentication/authorization is working/sync'd up between http and sockets).

Meteor has some nice packaging and deploy stuff and the hosting is nice, but that to me is a nice-to-have.

tete2• 14 years ago

Nice, there is a reaction from SocketStream on this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833096

alexro• 14 years ago

I'm at risk of sounding offensive, but I don't mean it. I just want to point out that to me many recent accomplishments in the realm of web frameworks sound similar to how Microsoft was making noise back in the day with their frameworks.

The MS frameworks were great in themselves, they even cooperated somewhat. But they ultimately lacked in the ability to support long-term development, you know, when people just drop out of the project and you suddenly need to bring someone in ASAP.

Keeping this in mind will allow the new generation of "web guys" do better than us, the "desktop guys".

j0hnlucas• 14 years ago

Going through the examples now. This is blowing my mind. Excellent job guys!!!

erjjones• 14 years ago

If this is what it says it is ... then it will rival Rails for sure.

darylteo• 14 years ago

Hi Geoff,

something I've been wondering: how can Meteor help prevent race conditions? For example, if there is a lengthy piece of text (say a blog post) being edited by > 1 person. Can Meteor simply lock a resource and prevent edits on client-side or is this something that needs further tweaking by the developer? Or will it somehow have Google Docs style collaborative editing?

Regards, daryl

jameswyse• 14 years ago

This is.. Awesome!

I've been using node.js for a while and I think I've tried all of the different frameworks, none of them seemed quite right.. I eventually settled on using express and building on top of it with modules and my own code.

When I installed the leaderboard example I expected a big directory with a million files.. my jaw dropped when I saw the whole app was 3 files! And app.js was tiny!

This looks like the node framework we've all been waiting for.

I really can't wait until this is more polished so I can actually use it for live apps. Great job guys, bravo!

villagefool• 14 years ago

Trying to read your docs and examples to figure what is in the framework (Leaderboard is a Meteor object?) and how it works. An image showing the sequence/flow of data between client/server/framework/and user code, would of helped a lot.

mikecaron• 14 years ago

Can't wait to deploy my first meteor app on Heroku!

mkmcdonald• 14 years ago

So, has anyone actually read the code?

I'd guess that these guys have spent a maximum of one month writing JavaScript. It's a giant mess.

All flash, no substance.

Raynos• 14 years ago

Agreed, the codebase is a mess.

The ideas are nice, the implementation is absolutely horrible.

hk_kh2• 14 years ago

I have typed a (lame) version of the installer compatible with archlinux (through dpkg) https://raw.github.com/gist/2360250/a5d101386590a17fed026c7b...

EDIT: didn't see https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=24167 ...

Metapony• 14 years ago

Ha! I was watching the example just now, and got a sudden grey screen http error -- "No data received"

goldmab• 14 years ago

Shouldn't this page be more clear about the fact that this completely insecure and not currently suitable for any public website, due to the unlimited database rights?

vishl• 14 years ago

What are the client-side performance implications? I am worried about running this on mobile clients (mobile web or within phonegap). Three things in particular:

1. Running complex DB queries on the client

2. The in-memory database cache described in the documentation using a lot of memory

3. Having little control over how often the client hits the server and vice versa.

tent1• 14 years ago

At first face it looks a genius idea, but the more I think about it the less convinced I am about it all.

It seems as though it has combined automatic polling and asynchronous updating together, and has removed traditional controllers and models. Yeah, it's cool out of the box and yeah, it's great for scaffolding and rapid development.

But really, it seems like another stack to learn and completely depend upon, and with codebase that 'liquid' it seems like it's much riskier than doing things traditionally. I'd be worried that it auto-injects into the running app.

Don't get me wrong — it's amazing. But what's the real, actual benefit here?

erikpukinskis2• 14 years ago

I'm surprised no one is talking about the glaring hole, which is security. It's apparently on the developers' short list of high priority features (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10100813/data-validation-...) but it doesn't seem like a trivial addition.

With client-side DB access, and eventual consistency baked into the platform as a core feature, you can't just throw "if current_user == object.owner" in your controller and call it a day. I'd love to know what they're thinking here.

Certainly you could go with a row-level security scheme like CouchDB has, where you attach little javascript snippets to your database that check security. But then how does the client verify? Maybe you can just assume that only malicious users will ever bump into security problems and so client-side verification is unnecessary.

If auth is baked into the framework, then maybe they can give you basic row-level security for free by maintaining a user table with auth tokens that's only accessible on the server side, and passing the auth token along with every database request, and maintaining a meteor-controlled owner key on objects. But that doesn't help if your security checks are more involved. I.e.: "if object.owner.friends.includes?(current_user)".

I'd love to hear what they're planning for this.

upinsmoke• 14 years ago

From the doc: "Currently the client is given full write access to the collection. They can execute arbitrary Mongo update commands. Once we build authentication, you will be able to limit the client's direct access to insert, update, and remove. We are also considering validators and other ORM-like functionality."

erikpukinskis2• 14 years ago

Yeah, I read that too. :) It doesn't really address my questions about how they'll pull that off.

romaniv• 14 years ago

That's a common problem with a lot of web frameworks. Every single one of them claims to make "web development" easier. They promote themselves by showing how well they solve some narrowly-defined and often imaginary problem (in this case - client-side updates), but completely side-step all the typical issues that really make web development difficult: user and group management, caching, validation, authentication, permission handling, stuff that prevents XSS, CSRF and injection attacks, version upgrades, dependency management and so on.

Anything can be made to look easy if you're ignoring real-life issues. Heck, you can do seamless client updates by refreshing all the pages on my website every second. It will be inefficient, but it is easily doable.

ofrasergreen• 14 years ago

I think you take for granted some features commonly provided by modern web frameworks addressing what used to make web development difficult. For example, in the pre-Rails era, building just a simple CRUD website used to be difficult.

For arguments sake, if we say there are 20 "real-life issues" then all web frameworks tend to address up to 12. New frameworks are created to address some of the issues of the past frameworks but with regressions in other areas.

Recently, I've been using Lift which happens to be very strong on most of the points you named, yet in retrospect, I don't feel it made web development easier overall because it has other deficiencies.

dgreensp2• 14 years ago

Posted on SO:

Meteor has data validation already, though not user authentication.

The model is that the server chooses what data to expose for reading, and the server also performs the real writes against the database. The client only simulates the mutations. You can define your own mutations ("methods"), and have them simulated on the client or not. If access checks pass on the client, they still might fail on the server. The server can run additional or different code, and you can hide this code from the client by putting it in the "server" directory. If the method results in different side-effects on the server than on the client, the differences are synced down to the client -- exactly what you'd want.

However, in new projects, to make things easier for first-time Meteor developers, we auto-publish all server data. To turn this off, type "meteor remove autopublish". That is, auto-publishing is the default for new projects but not the default for meteor overall.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

I was shocked when I saw the client-side DB access in the video. It seems like absolute insanity to me.

Even when I knew very little about web development, the principle of not accessing the database on the client side seemed obvious and very important.

neilk• 14 years ago

But they aren't accessing the database. They are accessing a data structure on the client, and changes are propagated to the server. There are opportunities to reject that change at the server.

This trick is already in use in a lot of places. If you click an upvote on Reddit, it doesn't do a complete round-trip, it just increments the count in place, and then issues a command to the server to do a "real" increment. If, in the meantime, someone disabled your account, then there is a disagreement. But it's obvious that the client's idea loses.

Eventual consistency is in mainstream use on the server, with frameworks like Cassandra et al. This is just a generalization of that to the web client.

ronreiter• 14 years ago

There's a really good reason why an API should be written (like REST API for example) between the client and the server, and that the client should not be exposed to the internal workings of the database for many reasons.

The API should be carefully programmed and kept abstract from the database, which might be one day changed completely. To keep the user interface agnostic, it should not be aware of how the database works.

Also, this is a recipe for mistakes, since giving the client direct access to the database (even if it is secured) raises questions about the data integrity and data protection. It is much more prone to abuse that way.

I'd love to see a CAPTCHA signup implementation with meteor.

fascinated• 14 years ago

#fuckyeah geoff!

cslarson• 14 years ago

This looks like it has some similarities to Derby (http://derbyjs.com/) and SocketStream (http://socketstream.org/). Will be interesting to see with authentication and permission handling.

iamleppert• 14 years ago

How are they delivering a result back from those async mongo function calls right away on the client? Anyone know??

mcgwiz• 14 years ago

I wonder how much money they burned to get that domain name. Overall, this seems to be a production that feels much glossier and slicker than other technology "debuts". Is this the new way to launch a technology? Razzle and dazzle the programmer into the latest cargo cult... :/

buster• 14 years ago

reads like socketstream

devs1010• 14 years ago

Weird how this just came out a day ago as I've been starting to learn node and I was just trying to figure out a way to blend backbone with node so that I could re-use models server-side. I saw this yesterday on the front page but didn't pay much attention to it and then today I remembered seeing it and came back to it and it looks like it solves the issue I had been trying to figure out myself. All the examples, etc I could find on combing backbone and node seemed half-baked and I couldn't find an easy to follow example for a beginner, its as if this came to the surface just in time.. I am definitely going to give it a try

kelvin0• 14 years ago

I think this is a great idea, however I still am still adamant to use Javascript. The framework is a great step in the right direction, and is quite an evolution from something like Google Gears.

I would love to use this framework if it was implemented as Google's NaCL, running 'native' code instead of Javascript.

it• 14 years ago

This looks similar to another project being worked on by a friend of mine: http://objectfabric.com. A couple of big differences are that ObjectFabric is implemented in Java, and it is supposed to support secure authentication.

Edit: Looking a bit more, I noticed that ObjectFabric doesn't yet support JavaScript directly, only through GWT.

desireco42• 14 years ago

Pretty awesome. I like discussion so far, a lot of good points made, however no-one didn't mention now.js, and this kind of is mostly similar to now.js and magic it does.

It definitely has a potential to bring huge changes. I love how packages are bundled. Other things as well. I will try it out with coffeescript.

Congratulations guys, this is pretty awesome.

netopolit• 14 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but Meteor seem similar to Derby (derbyjs.com). Don't have any experience with either yet but Derby's MIT license seems more appealing than Meteor's GPL / commercial license.

AhtiK• 14 years ago

Being licensed as GPL2 ( https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/LICENSE.txt ) isn't this a risk when using it for any commercial purpose?

troels• 14 years ago

Very impressive and an inevitable evolution, I guess. Although I must say that this is exactly what Stallman is warning us about.

Javascript applications are fine as long as they are used as intended by the programmer, but they do not have the interoperability of a html+http application. Fundamentally, this is reducing the browser to a thin client.

reilly3000• 14 years ago

I would love to see somebody build HN or reddit on Meteor - I bet the social dynamic would be different. I don't know how, but it would be...

robomartin• 14 years ago

Why does one have to point to origin.meteor.com to host on a custom domain?

Does using "meteor bundle" also require pointing to origin.meteor.com?

spasquali2• 14 years ago

This is just the client code necessary to run a todo app: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/examples/todos/...

Seems rather fat. Fatter than what I've seen for Knockout, or Ember, or even Backbone.

As I suspected this idea of just dropping any package and bang it works depends on that package having been made available by the Meteor team, and the requisite wrapper/bindings made around the original package. Which means now using Meteor means you must use their package, which even with best intentions, means their team will have to keep up to date with every package you'd like to use, every new version, the bugs, etc.

What if my data comes from multiple sources ("the cloud" and "big data" and "3.0" means your apps don't all share the same persistence layer, and likely use several)

What if I push 1000 records of data to the client, in the html for efficiency and network reasons, to power my fancy D3 chloropleth, and the client interface allows manipulation of that (local) data. How do I take advantage of Meteor's data binding system? This is something almost every serious application does -- updating a local data structure and propagating that change to several views.

Overhead of having all these sockets open? If I want to change 20 items and then update my view, do I now have to write the boilerplate to store up 20 changes, then package, then send in one shot down the Meteor pipe? Do I make 20 calls via client DB bindings? Probably the former. Which means I end up doing a lot of work that I wouldn't have if I had a local model with CRUD methods (like Ember, Backbone, etc).

Latency compensation. Sounds great. So I say "pay my bill" and my interface updates with an optimistic confirmation. Great! Now I can drive my kid to the soccer game. Hope I notice that the number got switched back (server fail). How will I notice? Hope the developer implemented a noticeable notification system...

Security? Anyone with a browser can change my DB? How do you secure that? Log in? Now logged-in people can change my DB from their browser? Whitepaper is necessary, so this aspect can be tested.

Great team. Good ideas. But it is quite early yet.

spasquali2• 14 years ago

Meteor packages: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages

The comments here are telling: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/packages/handle...

atleta• 14 years ago

The demo video looks nice, but to me it stinks. Maybe I wasn't listening carefully enough, but exposing the database to client code...? Almost a decade ago, back the time when we were writing Java apps, there were some debates around if you should write fat clients (business logic in clients) or not on a local java email list. I happened to throw in the counter argument that you shouldn't give direct access to your db to anyone, but your own code. (Which means you have to use an API, because you can't control what's happening on a client.) Then some DBA guy said that you have to set up the DB access rights anyway and that should be enough. But of course, if you don't use stored procedures, you can't do it fine grained enough. And these were SQL databases (!). We know how that story ended.

But what I see here, is retrying what already have failed, only know the DB is even less protected. Doesn't seem very wise to me.

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