node js vs meteor js what s the difference

Question

So I ve been hearing reading alot about meteor js   The tutorials make it seem very sporty as a framework  but I m still a bit of a novice when it comes to web programming   I ve been trying over the last month and half to really learn node js and figure out how it all comes together   I like the how fast and easy it is to get up and running  and the community that comes along with it  which is exemplified by the mind blowing number of frameworks you can get for Node    But what about meteor   What are the real advantages of it  and what s the difference   Has anyone started as a node js user and  converted  or is it still more of a curious new framework

User · Answer

Meteor is a framework built ontop of node.js. It uses node.js to deploy but has several differences.

The key being it uses its own packaging system instead of node's module based system. It makes it easy to make web applications using Node. Node can be used for a variety of things and on its own is terrible at serving up dynamic web content. Meteor's libraries make all of this easy.

User · Answer

A loose analogy is   Meteor is to Node as Rails is to Ruby   It s a large  opinionated framework that uses Node on the server  Node itself is just a low-level framework providing functions for sending and receiving HTTP requests and performing other I O   Meteor is radically ambitious  By default  every page it serves is actually a Handlebars template that s kept in sync with the server  Try the Leaderboard example  You create a template that simply says  List the names and scores   and every time any client changes a name or score  the page updates with the new data   not just for that client  but for everyone viewing the page   Another difference  While Node itself is stable and widely used in production  Meteor is in a  preview  state  There are serious bugs  and certain things that don t fit with Meteor s data-centric conceptual model  such as animations  are very hard to do   If you love playing with new technologies  give Meteor a spin  If you want a more traditional  stable web framework built on Node  take a look at Express

User · Answer

Meteor s strength is in it s real-time updates feature which works well for some of the social applications you see nowadays where you see everyone s updates for what you re working on   These updates center around replicating subsets of a MongoDB collection underneath the covers as local mini-mongo  their client side MongoDB subset  database updates on your web browser  which causes multiple render events to be fired on your templates   The latter part about multiple render updates is also the weakness   If you want your UI to control when the UI refreshes  e g   classic jQuery AJAX pages where you load up the HTML and you control all the AJAX calls and UI updates   you ll be fighting this mechanism   Meteor uses a nice stack of Node js plugins  Handlebars js  Spark js  Bootstrap css  etc  but using it s own packaging mechanism instead of npm  underneath along w  MongoDB for the storage layer that you don t have to think about   But sometimes you end up fighting it as well   e g   if you want to customize the Bootstrap theme  it messes up the loading sequence of Bootstrap s responsive css file so it no longer is responsive  but this will probably fix itself when Bootstrap 3 0 is released soon    So like all  full stack frameworks   things work great as long as your app fits what s intended   Once you go beyond that scope and push the edge boundaries  you might end up fighting the framework

[node.js] node.js vs. meteor.js what's the difference?

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