Meteor

Meteor¹ could be considered the first full-stack JavaScript meta-framework; it was released in early 2012 and has since been regularly updated with new features. Unlike most other meta-frameworks, Meteor can be used with any front-end framework, including React, Vue, Svelte and Angular, and the same code base can also be used for developing mobile and desktop applications. Meteor focuses on providing communication between the back- and front-end, including real-time features.

Comparison

Each of the requirements is scored on a scale from 1 (very poor) to 5 (very good).

Target use

Score: 5. Meteor puts their focus on interactive web apps, specifically providing real-time features.

Client-side interactivity

Score: 4. The client-side of Meteor applications behaves as a single-page application in the chosen framework. For features such as page routing, additional plugins have to be used.

Data transmission

Score: 5. The ability to easily use (real-time) information from the (MongoDB) database in the application is one of Meteor’s core features.

Server-side rendering

Score: 2. By default, Meteor does not support server-side rendering. It can, however, be manually implemented using the chosen client-side framework.

TypeScript support

Score: 3. Meteor provides a package for using TypeScript in your own code, and an aditional package that can provide tools for their core packages. However, a large part of the ecosystem is still JavaScript-only.

Local deployment

Score: 3. Meteor’s tooling can build an application written in the framework into standalone bundle. These bundles, however, are dependent on a specific, outdated version of Node.js, which makes it rather unflexible and difficult to use in environments that already contain newer versions of the runtime.

Ease of use

Score: 2. Meteor has its own package ecosystem, which means things tend to work a bit different from normal. The documentation is expansive, but because many features are put into packages, things can be difficult to find.

Community

Score: 3. Meteor has an official forum where answers to many questions can be found, in addition to those on StackOverflow. With the declining popularity of the framework, however, the community has become less active.