Meteor: Back from the shadows

I went from wanting to rewrite our entire app to being optimistic about the future of Meteor. Here are the main reasons why I think the future of Meteor is bright.

Fullstack front-end frameworks

Blitz is a full-stack React framework. It reminds us of simpler times when for example PHP was used to server-side render websites. It allowed us to access the database and return the markup filled with the data necessary to display it. Fast forward a few years to see single-page applications become popular, along with a separate REST or GraphQL backend project. The drawback? You'd usually have at least one developer working on the front-end and a separate team for the back-end.

Blitz is built on the same principles as Meteor, but using the latest web technologies. The fact that Blitz is growing leaves me optimistic about Meteor's future.

Supporting the major front-end frameworks

Blaze is Meteor's default rendering system but React, Vue, Angular, and Svelte can also be used with Meteor. In fact, we are writing everything new using React with Typescript and will eventually phase out every Blaze component while benefiting from the power of Meteor.

Meteor 2.0

When React introduced Fast Refresh it shortened the feedback loop for developers, boosting the developer experience significantly. Hot Module Replacement is one of the new features introduced in Meteor's upcoming 2.0 release. For us, it decreased the rebuild time from up to 40 seconds down to 2 seconds - a 95% decrease! Tree Shaking is also coming in the 2.0 release that removes unused code at compile-time, resulting in smaller bundle sizes for the end-user.

Conclusion

Have you ever tried Meteor? If you tried it a long time ago, a lot has changed. I recommend you give it a spin for your next side-project.

Have any questions? Hit me up on Twitter 🐦 gunnarthedev