Meteor is a javascript application framework that was developed with the intent of helping developers to create more complicated web applications quicker. Meteor allows developers to combine a lot different types of features from different languages to make the most of the application. For example, in the practice application I developed for class we had to use HTML, CSS, Spacebars, and JavaScript to create the web application. You are able to use the best parts of all the languages and combine to make something truly special.
You might be wondering why this essay is labeled shooting star and the first paragraph is about meteor. As I mentioned earlier Meteor lets users create beautiful applications effortlessly and efficiently. Well this is just a wish that I wish upon a shooting star because meteor sucks. My overall experience with meteor so far has been negative and I do not like the learning curve that it presents. Obviously take this with a grain of salt because I am a new user of meteor and am still learning but in my view, which is probably the view of most new users, meteor is a very difficult tool to grasp.
One difficult thing is knowing which packages to install and remove. If not for the specific instructions for the projects I do not think I would have known which packages to install or uninstall. Translating this to a project that I would do on my own I would have trouble knowing what each package offers. Going through the library of packages and figuring out which ones offer the features I am looking for would take a long time. I will admit that the installation of the packages is easy with just a simple command line command but everything else about it is inconvenient.
I cool thing about meteor is the ability for the server to auto update the client’s webpage when any part of the code is modified. Instead of having to shutdown the program and then recompiling the code the application can be refreshed and any changes will be shown in the browser. This is a very good debugging feature and saves a lot of time for developers. Any data in the database is also kept when refreshing the application and it only shows the updates that the new code implements.
So do I recommend staying away from Meteor? That remains to be decided as I think to have a final decision I need to gain more experience working with the framework. I think if I were to make a decision now I would say stick with meteor because I do see the benefits it offers and most of the cons that I encountered in my experience is due to my lack of experience working with meteor. In fact some of the problems I have mentioned earlier are not as prevalent now compared to only a week ago. As long as you learn as you go meteor is something that could make wishes come true.