Came across a great tweet today highlighting the complexity of building web apps in 2025:
It made me wonder how many aspiring developers feel this way? Navigating the sheer number of tools and services can be overwhelming. For those just starting their web development journey, the initial learning curve can feel incredibly steep.
Speaking of tackling complexity, have you ever explored MeteorJS? Back in the day (and still!), it aimed to provide a more integrated, "batteries included" experience, addressing many of the challenges outlined in the tweet quite well.
Curious about how MeteorJS handled things mentioned in the tweet? Here's a checklist of how MeteorJS tackled these challenges:
💻Frontend / Backend: Offers a reactive frontend (originally Blaze, later integrated with React, Vue, and Solid) tightly coupled with a Node.js backend.
☁️ Hosting: There is a paid service, Galaxy, which allows you to deploy your Meteor app with a single command. Meteor apps can also be easily self-hosted using tools like Meteor Up.
🗄️ Database: Comes with built-in support for MongoDB and a reactive data layer that automatically pushes database changes to the frontend. Also, Meteor conveniently embeds MongoDB in its local development environment. This means you don't need to install or configure MongoDB separately to start building and experimenting with MeteorJS projects.
🔑 Authentication: Provided by official packages for handling user accounts, including password-based authentication and social logins.
📁 Blob Storage: While there are no official packages, There is a well-established packages meteor-files by Veliov Group. Which lets you pload files to AWS, GridFS, DropBox or Google Drive.
✉️Email: Supported by an official package for sending emails directly via SMTP.
⚙️Background Jobs: Meteor supports packages from the npm ecosystem. You can use your favorite npm packages for this, such as agenda.js or bull.
🔍Monitoring: If you use Galaxy hosting, monitoring is provided out of the box. If you are self-hosting, services like (Monti APM)[https://montiapm.com/] is available.
🤫Secrets (Configuration Management): It provides a built-in mechanism (Meteor.settings) for managing deployment-specific configuration, including sensitive information.
Meteor has a vibrant and helpful community! You can find an official community forum and a community-run Discord server where many developers discuss the framework and help each other out. Feel free to chime in there with your experiences or questions.
Alternatively, you can also post your questions or thoughts as a comment below this post!
If you are just starting your web development journey and feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices, give MeteorJS a try! Its integrated approach can provide a smoother and more focused learning experience.
Many thanks to Harry for the detailed feedback.
Top comments (5)
Agee on every point. Adding my 2¢ — Meteor.js is great and pleasure to use during development and production-ready, once you build it it’s the node.js app as any other. Meaning it’s easy do deploy and scale horizontally
Great article, man. Keep up the good work 👏
Nice article, this is a good topic! I think the problem is because everyone wants to stick to a TypeScript / Next.js type of stack and work in one language. A meta framework will always be more headache, you have to pick components individually yourself.
MeteorJS is a nice stack, I worked with it previously years ago, and it was a smooth experience, but I would stay away from JavaScript-based frameworks if I were a Junior dev (backend) and just pick one of the big stacks: Asp.net, Django, Ruby on Rails, Laravel.
Learn MVC, routing, SQL queries, queues, console tasks, Docker, etc. All the fundamentals for backend development. For the frontend, it's much easier because you just learn one thing, i.e., Next.js / Nuxt / Angular.
Not that there's anything wrong with JS/TypeScript frameworks, but I find that juniors tend to get stuck in the framework's way of thinking and don't learn fundamentals, don't even understand the basics of routing and request handling, networking, etc...
With something like Django, you worry less about what component to choose and focus more on the engineering. Using just plain templates, one can build CRUD apps, even complex CRM type applications. Not every app needs complex reactivity.
Then, once those concepts are understood, you can slowly bring in React and other JS tools.
You touched on some key shifts I've observed in the web development landscape over the years. This reminds me of my own journey through the different phases.
When I was first learning, PHP was definitely the go-to for server-side tasks. Tools like XAMPP and simple FTP made it feel incredibly empowering to get things running. A little bit of AJAX felt like adding rocket boosters to those early projects.
Then the MEAN stack (the original one!) came along, and things definitely took a turn towards SPA and API driven development. Node.js evolved so rapidly, and the ecosystem was in constant flux. It felt like every major Node version required significant updates to your application. During that time, Meteor provided a sense of stability for me, or at least that's how it felt. Plus, the community was fantastic.
While the world was having intense debates about React vs. Angular, and then the Redux/Flux/MobX wars, followed by class vs. function components, and the rise of Vue, the frontend landscape felt like a constant battlefield. The beauty was, Blaze, Meteor's built-in view layer, just kept working reliably, offering a welcome sense of stability amidst all the frontend evolution and preventing a lot of rewrites in compare to what I experience with React and Angular.
Interestingly, throughout all of this, the projects I built with Meteor seemed remarkably insulated from this constant churn. It was almost like the 'Meteor space' operated somewhat independently of the wider JavaScript ecosystem's rapid changes.
Of course, there are many excellent frameworks and toolchains out there, but within the realm of JavaScript, I feel like Meteor has not broken its promises of backward compatibility, has kept its APIs consistent, and has developed things under the hood without major breaking changes for almost a decade. And that's something to marvel at.
Awesome article! The Meteor community appreciates :)
ps: Charmander is always the right choice.