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JavaScript

Jon Mason
Jon Mason
13,199 Points
Posted by Jon Mason
Jon Mason
13,199 Points

Meteor

Hi Guys,

Just wondered if there were any plans to include courses / content / resources for the Meteor Platform?

https://www.meteor.com

Many thanks!

update checked here: https://teamtreehouse.com/roadmap and I guess this answers my question (it's a no.)

jsdevtom
jsdevtom
16,963 Points
jsdevtom
jsdevtom
16,963 Points

Meteor is really quite slow. Seriously, I learned it for like 3 days. Then finally, after I had the basics and when I had a half decent prototype finished, I was shocked at just how slow it was. See here: https://forums.meteor.com/t/first-visit-loads-are-ridiculously-slow/3028

2 Answers

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points

Meteor in and of itself is not slow in my experience. In that particular thread, the OP finally admitted he was trying to cancel the deploy while it was happening too many times, and clearing the server and starting afresh fixed his problem with the exact same code.

As for the rest of the thread, you can find hundreds of threads about the same blanket "app is slow" complaints regardless of language or framework. There are many variables that go into a slow app, blaming it on the framework squarely is not fair.

I'm developing in meteor right now, and I can tell you it's far from slow if you follow best practices. On the flip side, it is very easy to bloat, and that can slow meteor down a lot. But that's a developer problem, not a framework problem. I would second a Meteor track, but I would imagine that MEAN will continue to receive the attention for now.

jsdevtom
jsdevtom
16,963 Points
jsdevtom
jsdevtom
16,963 Points

I had only been using it for a total of like a week before decided against Meteor, so my experience is no way near as large as yours. I did read up about things like fast-render, but it then realized that the flexibility wasn't what I was hoping for. Also, when I looked at the apps that had been built with Meteor, the initial average page load time seemed slower than that of other web apps in general. However, when I look at the new examples, they don't seem to be as slow as before (Now ~2 seconds initial load, before, ~ 3 seconds)

Seeing as you're here: can I ask, how long would you say it takes you as a rough average to develop a Meteor app? And what is the average page load time?

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points

I've noticed similar results as you. What I think is happening right now, and has been happening, is meteor came out strong with atmosphere as their way to host and include packages. The last couple months, atmosphere has been "dying" in favor of npm. Meteor's recent shift to 1.3 made that even more apparent. I've noticed there are a ton of dead and bloated atmosphere packages. Another good step Meteor just made is that in 1.2 and older, everything gets loaded everytime. That's obviously bad for performance. 1.3 came out not that long ago, and adopted Nodes way to conditionally include packages when you need, good for performance.

My app is very small still, and so I'm getting page load speeds in less than 1 second. I imagine that I'm going to end up over 1 second, but less than 2 second load speeds.

I'll tell you what though, its by far more difficult for me to develop an app. I've been working on this app for about 5 months, and it's my first big run at node and meteor. I come from a Ruby and Rails background, and I would say I'm honestly about half as fast developing in meteor right now because I'm not use to ES2015, so I have to spend a lot of time in the documentation.

The swaying factor for me was data on the wire. Although the upcoming rails 5 is going to make this even easier, I though, and still think that overall it's less work to get a live data on the wire app running in meteor than it is to get it running in rails.

If I was building a more simple http request driven website or app, just me personally, I'd go back to ruby, I understand it better I feel.

Talgat Amanbayev
Talgat Amanbayev
3,983 Points
Talgat Amanbayev
Talgat Amanbayev
3,983 Points

I have been developing in Meteor for more than half a year now. Like Kevin stated above, Meteor has implemented new imports feature that allows to manage content that gets loaded to the client, its order and timing. That makes initial page loads faster, since you can serve content based on user rights/navigation in your webapp: for the initial landing and authorization pages you can serve the bare minimum and load more from there as user logs in and navigates through your app. I have been developing in other languages and frameworks, including MEAN stack but I think Meteor is really good for prototyping single page web apps with socket connection to the server (reactive data is really impressive when building fancy reports page or chat or user presence). I believe Meteor and ReactJS tracks/courses are really big to just ignore and I hope Team Treehouse will consider adding one soon.