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Meteor vs PhoneGap: What are the differences?
Meteor: An ultra-simple, database-everywhere, data-on-the-wire, pure-Javascript web framework. A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets; PhoneGap: Easilily create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. PhoneGap is a web platform that exposes native mobile device apis and data to JavaScript. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platforms' native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's sensors, data, and network status.
Meteor can be classified as a tool in the "Frameworks (Full Stack)" category, while PhoneGap is grouped under "Cross-Platform Mobile Development".
Some of the features offered by Meteor are:
- Pure JavaScript
- Live page updates
- Clean, powerful data synchronization
On the other hand, PhoneGap provides the following key features:
- Android
- Blackberry
- iOS
"Real-time" is the primary reason why developers consider Meteor over the competitors, whereas "Javascript" was stated as the key factor in picking PhoneGap.
Meteor and PhoneGap are both open source tools. It seems that Meteor with 41.1K GitHub stars and 5.03K forks on GitHub has more adoption than PhoneGap with 4.15K GitHub stars and 974 GitHub forks.
Meteor, Glympse, and Enfluence.io are some of the popular companies that use Meteor, whereas PhoneGap is used by WebbyLab, Binary.com, and Infoshare. Meteor has a broader approval, being mentioned in 195 company stacks & 152 developers stacks; compared to PhoneGap, which is listed in 86 company stacks and 34 developer stacks.
Next.js is probably the most enjoyable React framework our team could have picked. The development is an extremely smooth process, the file structure is beautiful and organized, and the speed is no joke. Our work with Next.js comes out much faster than if it was built on pure React or frameworks alike. We were previously developing all of our projects in Meteor before making the switch. We left Meteor due to the slow compiler and website speed. We deploy all of our Next.js projects on Vercel.
This basically came down to two things: performance on compute-heavy tasks and a need for good tooling. We used to have a Meteor based Node.js application which worked great for RAD and getting a working prototype in a short time, but we felt pains trying to scale it, especially when doing anything involving crunching data, which Node sucks at. We also had bad experience with tooling support for doing large scale refactorings in Javascript compared to the best-in-class tools available for Java (IntelliJ). Given the heavy domain and very involved logic we wanted good tooling support to be able to do great refactorings that are just not possible in Javascript. Java is an old warhorse, but it performs fantastically and we have not regretted going down this route, avoiding "enterprise" smells and going as lightweight as we can, using Jdbi instead of Persistence API, a homegrown Actor Model library for massive concurrency, etc ...
Proguard?
ProGuard is the most popular optimizer for Java bytecode. It makes your Java and Android applications up to 90% smaller and up to 20% faster. ProGuard also provides minimal protection against reverse engineering by obfuscating the names of classes, fields and methods.
How to use it inCordova app?
I didn't find any plugins for it. So I've implemented it by myself and shared it on GitHub.
Feel free to use!
Pros of Meteor
- Real-time252
- Full stack, one language200
- Best app dev platform available today183
- Data synchronization155
- Javascript152
- Focus on your product not the plumbing118
- Hot code pushes107
- Open source106
- Live page updates102
- Latency compensation92
- Ultra-simple development environment39
- Real time awesome29
- Smart Packages29
- Great for beginners23
- Direct Cordova integration22
- Better than Rails16
- Less moving parts15
- It's just amazing13
- Blaze10
- Great community support8
- Plugins for everything8
- One command spits out android and ios ready apps.6
- It just works5
- 0 to Production in no time5
- Coding Speed4
- Easy deployment4
- Is Agile in development hybrid(mobile/web)4
- You can grok it in a day. No ng nonsense4
- Easy yet powerful2
- AngularJS Integration2
- One Code => 3 Platforms: Web, Android and IOS2
- Community2
- Easy Setup1
- Free1
- Nosql1
- Hookie friendly1
- High quality, very few bugs1
- Stack available on Codeanywhere1
- Real time1
- Friendly to use1
Pros of PhoneGap
- Javascript46
- Backed by Adobe13
- Free11
- Easy and developer friendly9
- Support more platforms6
- It's javascript, html, and css3
- Common code base across all mobile platform2
- Not bound to specific framework1
- Powerful Framework1
- Runs on mobile browser1
- Similar UI across all platform1
- Free easy fast and not buggy in my experience0
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Cons of Meteor
- Does not scale well5
- Hard to debug issues on the server-side4
- Heavily CPU bound4
Cons of PhoneGap
- Never as good as a native app2
- Created for web pages, not for complex Apps1
- Poor user experience1
- Not build for high performance1
- Hard to see1
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What is Meteor?
What is PhoneGap?
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