is IronRouter really dead?
For years, iron:router was one of the packages everybody used. It was no brainer; you created a new Meteor app and immediately installed IronRouter.
But it was before… before Arunoda decided that IronRouter wasn’t good enough (for good reasons). So he created a new router called FlowRouter.
Today, everybody (even MDG) says you should use FlowRouter.
I used both and to be honest, it’s not so easy. Yes, IronRouter has some drawbacks. The main one is that everything is reactive and when the app becomes big, it’s hard to control the rendering/reactivity and can become slow. I agree but not all apps are made to become big and with IronRouter you don’t have to put autorun everywhere to make things reactive.
So in the end, with FlowRouter you have the control (and so you have to write more code), and with IronRouter you have the easiness (it handles things automatically).
Some people say IronRouter is not maintained anymore but the latest update 1.0.12 is one month old, not so bad!
Today, everybody talks about FlowRouter like if IronRouter was already dead, but is it really the case?
Let’s take a look at the numbers:
- IronRouter direct download: 437941
- FlowRouter direct download: 12065
Ok, it’s an easy one, IronRouter is older and since the download are cumulative, of course, the number is bigger.
With the new release of fastosphere, we can see download count for the last month / week, so let’s see that:
- IronRouter direct download last month: 26833 (3776 last week)
- FlowRouter direct download: 3391 (748 last week)
OOOOKKKKKK. There’s 7 more times download for IronRouter. Not so bad for a dead unmaintained package!
Since I have daily stats for all packages I created a small Google Spreadsheet to compare the life of these 2 packages:
The smooth lines are the trending, and ok, the trending line is not good at all for IronRouter.
I really wonder if we can trust Meteor stats. I don’t understand what’s happen in January 2015 to make IronRouter download increasing from 600 to 1700. If you have some comments about that, please share.
But anyway, FlowRouter doesn’t seems to take off and IronRouter doesn’t seems to die.
rank.meteor.com
Download counts are cool but doesn’t really represent what people are using in live applications.
I revamped http://rank.meteor.com (feel free to add more Meteor apps) and extract which packages those ranked apps are using. You can see the result, it’s quite interesting.
IronRouter 90% of apps use it (139 apps)
FlowRouter 18% of apps use it (29 apps)
Of course, I only rank 155 Meteor applications but those applications are real one, not test nor hello world applications. So it’s quiet interesting to see what “real” apps are using today and today, without any doubt, those apps are using IronRouter.
Conclusion
Ok, it’s a small post but I just wanted to share with you number I’ve found.
We’ll see what the future of those 2 packages will be. I really hope both will continue to exist because they are not made for the same goal and both are really well made.
