Justifiable Criticisms, Known Limitations, and Frequently

Asked Questions about Meteor

Some developers have raised a number of justifiable and unjustifiable criticisms about Meteor.
While some of the concerns and criticisms have been either debunked or resolved in recent versions
of Meteor, some remain justifiable. The frequently asked questions, known limitations, and
justifiable criticisms about Meteor follow, along with a comment or an answer to each:

Frequently Asked Meteor Questions

1. Q: Can I build mission critical applications with Meteor?
A: Sacha Greif, Coauthor of DiscoverMeteor
Meteor is still beta software, but its actually very close to the 1.0 release. So
within the next few months, itll probably be safe to assume that Meteor is ready
for whatever you can throw at it!
2. Q: What kinds of applications can I not build with Meteor?
A: Sacha Greif, Coauthor of DiscoverMeteor
Meteor isnt great for anything thats mainly static content, like blogs or simple
static sites. As a general rule, Meteor is great for apps, but not for sites. Another
factor to consider is the fact that Meteor doesnt do server-side content
generation yet, meaning that your app wont work without JavaScript enabled.
3. Q: Do you have proof of Meteor holding up and scaling well in production?
A: (?? Awaiting an official response from Meteor Development Group)
4. Q: What big companies or funded startups are using Meteor?
A: Sacha Greif, Coauthor of DiscoverMeteor
Theres a list on the Meteor site, but it could probably be updated. Two
companies not mentioned there are LookBack and Respondly.
5. Q: Does Meteor scale at least as well as Rails in production?
A: (?? Awaiting an official response from Meteor Development Group)

Known Meteor Limitations

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Meteor works only on Mac, Linux 64, and Linux 32.

It does not officially support Windows, Solaris, and Freebsd.
It supports only one database: MongoDB.
It has no support for sharding on MongoDB.
Its frontend framework does not have reusable UI components.
It has only partial support for Redis.
It does not work well with SEO, even with its Spiderable hack.

Justifiable Meteor Criticisms

1. Dnprock: Reactive template is nice but can lead to very hard to debug issues. Theres no
really good way to debug reactive update trigger.
A: (?? Awaiting an official response from Meteor Development Group)
2.

Lack of generators when compared with Rails and other frameworks

Neya: Were talking about the basic reason why people choose rails: Productivity (Getting stuff done) and getting your product out to the market. I think in this perspective nothing beats rails:

rails new blog

rails generate scaffold Post title:string text:text
rails s
How many lines of actual code I have written so far to actually get my basic blog idea up
and running? None.
A: (?? Awaiting an official response from Meteor Development Group)
3. Many [Atmospherejs.com, Meteor package management] packages dont have the most vital
information; the readme file for most packages is missing.
A: Tom Coleman, Developer on Atmospherejs.com and Coauthor of
DiscoverMeteor
This is up to the package author to resolve, but the core Meteor packages are
currently in the process of being readme-ized by MDG (e.g. Oauth
Encryption)
4. Its front-end framework, Blaze.js, is neither as feature-rich and robust as Ember.js nor as
expansive and extensible as Angular.js.
A: (?? Awaiting an official response from Meteor Development Group)