Apparently, rumours of Meteor.js demise have been greatly exaggerated. Back in March 2020, the Meteor team released version 1.10 which saw a plethora of updates to the universal app platform.
Admittedly, it has been quite a few years since I have worked with Meteor. I remember trying it in the early days and being wowed by its ability to allow you to build applications that bring the front and back-end together without needing to configure anything.
I truly believe Meteor had a winning concept all of those years ago. Even now in 2020 and presumably 2021, server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation are problematic and configuration heavy with a lot of room for error.
Continuing on from their big release a few months ago, Meteor has announced version 1.11.
I don’t mean this to sound snarky, but I am both delighted and surprised to see that Meteor is alive and well. It is no surprise that developers flocked to React years ago and it has become the defacto standard for front-end applications.
But, it appears Meteor instead of trying to compete with the likes of React or Vue have embraced these frameworks. instead of being a framework, Meteor positions itself as a platform that can play nice with other frameworks and libraries in the ecosystem.
I have always seen Meteor as a platform, but in the earliest days of Meteor, it wasn’t overly flexible and getting it to work with other frameworks and libraries was quite problematic.
The Meteor CLI in my opinion has always been ahead of the game. Before React and Vue, Angular and other frameworks shipped with fancy CLI’s, Meteor has had an impressive one since the early days.
As a huge Firebase fan, I am tempted by the latest releases to give Meteor another try. It appears the early day issue of node_modules and performance issues have all been solved with the later releases and it is now a platform that allows you to build apps without worrying about configuration or things like MongoDB instances.
On my todo list this week is seeing if I can get Aurelia 2 to work with Meteor. Considering other frameworks and libraries appear to be compatible, I am sure that it’s probably not that difficult.
