tldr; There are experts, and there are experts.

Recently I came across evidence for time travel. I am referring to this blog post from 2016 - and outlining the same here in full glory.

Popular NodeJS Frameworks

Hapi, Meteor, Derby? Those were the days when Javascript was trying its super powers and finding itself on the good side - each and every time.

This post, as you have misread by now, is not about bashing some other blog. The authors do a good job by themselves. My intent is also not to warn the world of the danger of just listening to experts and wasting days/weeks on a framework that might not be worth the effort.

What I do like to point out, is the benefit of jumping everywhere and trying out everything. I like monkeying around Javascript and none of the frameworks above will be in my list.

Just because very few people use them, and unless you are a Guru (you should not be reading this post if you’re), you will find it difficult to debug silliest of the issues.

I was and am a fan of MeteorJS. I experimented quite a bit on the framework before moving on elsewhere.

• MeteorJS makes it really easy to build stuff
• Reactivity is out of the box - changes made by one user get pushed out to others. If that is not magic, I would have headed to Hogwarts for a refresher course
• Don’t worry about calling APIs, segregating code, worrying about validations etc. - Meteor takes care of all that

I also had issues -

• Meteor was getting adjusted to the new React, etc. world and Blaze was getting less popular
• Though you will find a tonne of materials on resolving issues - those were not relevant anymore
• Conventions were lax. There were developers continuing to use the “old way”, but the documentation moved on to new standards. New = better, but it was hard to get help

Javascript was more of a hobby thing for me at the time and I enjoyed the learning. But that experience woke me up to stay on the ‘right’, ‘popular’ frameworks at the beginning. By doing that, I could -

• get help faster. A lot of beginners are making the same mistakes
• depend on the framework to move fast and fix issues, improve performance and align to newer standards in the ecosystem (mostly)

In closing.. what say you, fellow human?