Meteor in the Wild: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reactive Programming

ams6110 13 years ago |

Might be a good idea to at least put

  <noscript>This page requires JavaScript</noscript>

on your site. All I see an expanse of white.

aroman 13 years ago | |

The last few lines of the article shed some light on OP's opinion of browsing with JavaScript disabled:

"you need to support browsers that don't have JavaScript enabled.

... ok, that last one was sufficiently low-probability that I'll stop there before I start telling you not to use Meteor if your customers gave up their computers in favor of the abacus."

Volpe 13 years ago | | |

I don't quite understand the whole "I cripple my browser" thing. Like, if you are going to disable javascript, why not CSS, and if you disable both of those... by not disable the renderer and just read the html... or demand people write plain text websites. Javascript seems rather arbitrary...

But I do wonder about the accessibility ramifications of only supporting javascript. Do all browsers support javascript?

stavrianos 13 years ago | | |

For a sufficiently lax definition of "browser", no.

Wilya 13 years ago | | |

> why not CSS

Disabling useless CSS stuff is pretty much what Readability is all about.

Besides, CSS generally doesn't claim much of my CPU to display peripheral stuff. Javascript, on the other hand ...

jacalata 13 years ago | |

I'm running a boilerplate firefox and on first load, I saw the same thing.

amadeus 13 years ago |

How can Meteor be taken seriously with shit like this?

This site barely works... Simply hangs with spinning jewish logos...

debergalis 13 years ago | |

[meteor dev] Ted and Nick found the issue. The site was running in development mode (what you get with "$ meteor run") instead of the direct bundle. That's now fixed.

In development mode, we wrap the whole application inside a monitoring process that includes a proxy server. It's how we support hot code push on a laptop, among other things. But it's not a configuration we intended for production use at scale. We'll think about how to make a clearer recommendation in the docs.

sgdesign 13 years ago | |

I posted my own Meteor app to HN the other day and it held up under traffic just fine: http://hnwishlist.com

So don't blame Meteor :)

gfodor 13 years ago | |

This could be anything, and be completely unrelated to meteor or related in a way that has no bearing on the claims of the article. He did just launch, after all.

amadeus 13 years ago | | |

I've had a couple of my sites hit by Hacker News before, it's not that much traffic.

But I am perhaps a bit biased, I already think Meteor is a joke of a product.

gfodor 13 years ago | | |

Most big things start out as jokes. (I don't hold an opinion one way or the other.) But you have to admit they are doing something semi-interesting.

amadeus 13 years ago | | |

I prefer to be interested in things that are ACTUALLY interesting; think Google's Spanner, SpaceX, etc, developed by neckbeards who know what they are doing.

Not some silly NodeJS/MongoDB API.

gfodor 13 years ago | | |

It's generally unkind to come in and trash other peoples' work, especially when it's work that is something designed to help make others' jobs easier and is being open sourced.

aptwebapps 13 years ago | | |

The site you're looking at isn't Meteor itself, it's a site that happens to use Meteor. And, as it turns out, it was being run in development mode.

primigenus 13 years ago |

I'm excited to try out your dating site given that it's built with Meteor and I'm a fan, but having to sign up three of my female friends to see it first is a buzz kill.

Perhaps you could consider a limited preview account for us HNers that doesn't let us date anyone but does let us check out what you built and sort of inspect things. That will help shine some positive light on Meteor with our crowd, many of whom will likely be unwilling to share an experimental Jewish dating site with their Facebook friends on a whim.

triplesec 13 years ago | |

yes, that's very "mid-period facebook" to force invitations on three friends (indeed I'm not sure that Facebook allows that any more for apps because of the annoyances). I'd also like to try it too, otherwise, since it's for both Jewish and Allies, as it were.

stuffihavemade 13 years ago |

What are the advantages to using Meteor over Rails/Django/Express, etc., for a dating site? Sure, the client server model is compelling, but you're giving up not only the Ruby/Python ecosystem, but the Node one as well. Did you consider something like Derby.js, which uses npm and is built on express?

pqdbr 13 years ago |

I liked the article a lot, got excited about giving Meteor a go for our next project, but then I checked out your website and got bummed. It takes +10 seconds to load ... the "loading " message. And then it just sits there, spinning the jewish logo.

mcot2 13 years ago |

I would be a lot more interested in meteor if it took more of a library approach and wasn't tied specifically to node.js and mongodb.

I understand they are moving towards this by having a protocol and different adapters for other databases.

belisarius222 13 years ago |

jspot dev here. fixed speed issue with help from Nick Martin from Meteor. Turns out I was running a dev-mode proxy to auto-reload code, but Nick figured out we could bypass it in the nginx config. Should be much faster now.

saint-loup 13 years ago |

I'm sorry, but why would you put something like this in your CSS:

    text-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,.5);

It makes the text blurred and jarring.

stavrianos 13 years ago | |

Perhaps an attempt to force/fake font smoothing?

paulyg 13 years ago |

"Coming soon on mobile. Check it out on your desktop or laptop." Really?

svachalek 13 years ago |

I think Meteor is fantastic in most respects but the REST-unfriendliness of it is a little puzzling in this day and age. It would be really nice to see it play well with others.

debergalis 13 years ago | |

[meteor dev]

Thanks. We're getting close to implementing a principled approach to REST endpoints and server-side routing. https://trello.com/card/page-model-server-side-rendering-res...

ibudiallo 13 years ago |

I guess your blog doesn't allow mobile, so I'm out. What's up with under construction just le the mobile user view it.

triplesec 13 years ago | |

You could try setting your mobile browser (default, or say Dolphin) to report itself as a desktop client. Workaround, and I usually have one of my mobile browsers set up like this for suboptimal mobile sites.

ibudiallo 13 years ago | | |

You are right, but most of the time, when a website is that complicated to access, it is not worth it.

orangethirty 13 years ago |

First time it did not load after waiting 32 seconds. Second time it did load, but after waiting 7 seconds.

belisarius222 13 years ago |

@saint-loup Good catch! That was old code, not noticeable in my usual browser. It's gone now.

adambom 13 years ago |

This doesn't work on my computer. Do I need to have Javascript installed? How do I do that?

krapp 13 years ago | |

Use a modern browser.

jbm 13 years ago |

Can't access as my phone gets redirected to an empty mobile page.