Is Meteor ready to impact your startup?
tl;dr around Q1 2014: No
Meteor is an open-source platform for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you’re an expert developer or just getting started.
In most startups time to market is essential, you want to go from burning money to making money and be a self sustained healthy business as soon as possible, and although this depends on what product you are developing, choosing the right technology to increase the productivity of your developers can be a mayor competitive advantage.
Requirements
Content creation was done in the browser, consuming the content was done on an iPad. The content creation was expected to be quite complex with lots of dragging, dropping and interface updates. It could become realtime collaborative in the future and on the consumption side, would probably be expanded to support other mobile platforms.
Let’s get to work!
The developer with the most experience on a particular stack usually takes the lead, naturally. So based on the experience of our developers we started out with just Ruby on Rails and see how far it would take us.
Pretty soon the HTML form based sending of data from browser to server started to show cracks as the user interface became more like a desktop application. After two weeks we ended up with tightly coupled jQuery code with lots of hard coded classes in selectors $(“.save_action”). It was a natural point in time to start looking for a technology that would allow for sustainable maintainability of our client side (browser) code base.
Enter Meteor
Although we started out looking for a javascript framework Meteor drew our attention for the incredible amount of features provided out of the box and being a great match with the requirements.
What features are we getting for free?
Authentication, Authorization, OAuth (‘sign in with facebook”), View templates, ORM, routing, API exposure (using collections), Realtime updates out of the box. This list keeps on going…
Can we still ask google for help?
After RTFM’ing, searching through references and asking your coworkers, you need to be able to find answers to common questions for when you get stuck by searching Google. Although Meteor.com provides some good move tutorials to get you started, common guides like how to run Meteor in production are not yet available.
Mature production facilities
By outsourcing your dev ops to for instance a PaaS platform like Heroku you can free up time to spend on building features. Meteor provides their own hosting service and can be immediately initialised when creating a new Meteor app. I think this is great but Meteor’s hosting service is just too immature. No third party add-ons, backups, rollbacks or other basic hosting services. I tried running it on Heroku with this buildpack but ended up in dependency hell and gave up.
Proven business success
Did other startups use this technology before and did they prove to be successful? Nope non yet, but on 25th of july 2012 they announced a 11.2 million dollar investment from top VC’s to fund the development of the project.
Meteor was such a great fit for this project that I spent almost two days to find a mature production environment to successfully deploy to. But I just couldn’t get it to work and that ended up as a huge red flag for me. So no Meteor is not ready to make an impact on your startup unless you have the time to do proper dev ops to manage your custom production servers. Also discipline yourself to keep away from something because it’s new and shiny, does your marketplace startup really requires to do realtime client/server synchronization?
I’m really looking forward to a more mature Meteor production environment and will definitely check back so I can use it on the next startup with similar requirements. Keep up the good work guys!
Auke van Scheltinga
Partner at Proto venture technology
