Meteor Gotchas

19 Oct 2017

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Meteor is a free and open-source isomorphic JavaScript framework written in Mode.js. Meteor enables rapid prototyping for applications across iOS, Android, and web-based applications. Meteor is integrated with MongoDB and uses the Distributed Data Protocol and a publish-subcribe pattern to maintain any chages made on the developer end onto the client end without the need for careful synchronization. On the client side, Meteor can be use with the Blaze templating engine as well as the Angular framework or React library for greater versatility and convinience of use.

Despite all that Meteor is capable of, it is also excrutiatingly clunky. My primary issues with using Meteor for a mere two weeks have been the time required for Meteor to build and re-sync apps and how demanding the framework is on my system. Ruuning Meteor on my (modest) laptop is rather intensive and will slow down any other processes I am attempting to run alongside Meteor, such as IntelliJ IDEA, GitHub Desktop, and my Chrome browser.

Of the two issues I am having, the more detrimental is the time required by Meteor to run and buld apps. Meteor typically requires about ten minutes of time to build an app. The only solution I can see is that I should try switching to a Linux OS. I am currently on Windows 10, which I love, but running Meteor is simply too slow and unresponsive for me to deal with givin the time contraints placed about me for my ICS 314 class and our timed in-class examinations. My friends who have switched over to Linux can build up the same application with only about ten-to-fifteen seconds of waiting. Switching to Linux, an inhenrently more light-weight OS, would solve both my problems of Meteor taking too long and sapping an excessive amount of my system resources from my other applications.

I have yet to implement this hopeful solution, but I am aiming to dual-boot my system sometime in the next week. Wish me luck!