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Meteor vs Play: 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; Play: The High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala. Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.
Meteor and Play belong to "Frameworks (Full Stack)" category of the tech stack.
"Real-time", "Full stack, one language" and "Best app dev platform available today" are the key factors why developers consider Meteor; whereas "Scala", "Web-friendly architecture" and "Built on akka" are the primary reasons why Play is favored.
Meteor and Play are both open source tools. It seems that Meteor with 41.2K GitHub stars and 5.03K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Play with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.77K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Meteor has a broader approval, being mentioned in 195 company stacks & 156 developers stacks; compared to Play, which is listed in 112 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.
In the past few months, a project we're working on grew up quite fast. Since we're adding more and more features, I'm considering migrating my Express/TS REST API towards a more solid and more "enterprise-like" framework. Since I am experienced with TypeScript but not so much with Rails nor Play (Scala), I'd like to have some advice on which one could provide the best development experience, and most importantly, the smoothest paradigm transition from the JS/TS world. I've worked on some personal project with Rails, but I've found the Ruby language really distant from what the TypeScript ecosystem and syntax are, whereas on the opposite - during the brief tours I've taken in the past weeks - it's been a pleasure coding in Scala. Obviously, there are some key differences between the two languages - and the two frameworks consequently - but despite all the ROR automation and ease of use I don't despise at all Scala's pragmatic and great features such as static typing, pattern matching, and type inference. So... Please help me out with the choice! Regards
I don't have the Scala experience to compare the two, but I can say that Ruby is a wonderful language. For procedural programming where you don't need a lot of concurrent execution threads, it's superior to Node.JS in my opinion. All of the concepts from Typescript have equivalent syntax in Ruby, but there are fewer symbols (e.g. () => { ... }); ) and more keywords (eg 'do ... end'). It's a very flexible language and allows for a lot of different approaches to how it's written, so coding standards and careful organization is important. In the long run, however, you'll find it quicker to debug than Node.JS and just as powerful.
If you are comfortable with TypeScript, why not evolve to a C# ecosystem? Asp.Net Core + Entity Framework is a mature and well supported technology. As far as I can see in the enterprise market, the most adopted choice is still Java. So, maybe you may have a look to SpringBoot - and ultimately Quarkus.
This is advice regardless of your background and requirements. The Play framework has a terrible and complicated design, don't risk it. I even suggest Spring and Kotlin over it! You can use Scala for small services and Data Engineering stuff and benefit optimizations and threading of JVM. RoR, on the other hand, has a huge development speed, which I believe is a big advantage cause you can handle performance bottlenecks later. Also, Scala has another downside, which is featureful in terms of OO and FP paradigms, which makes anyone write code freely with any personal style and makes it a problem in a team, Hence a coding style has to be defined if there would be Scala development team.
If software performance is your top priority, then Scala/Play is probably best. If developer productivity is your top priority, then Ruby on Rails is the best choice in my opinion.
The Rails framework is batteries-included. The framework takes care of many things by default so that you don't have to. Logging, security, etc. It's also well-integrated; for example, controllers understand models out of the box. I had a better experience with RoR than with Play.
On the other hand, Scala and the JVM are more performant in general, so they can scale to serve more requests per second on the same hardware.
If you're considering serverless functions, then Scala is probably a better choice because it would be faster to load, giving you better economics.
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 ...
Pros of Meteor
- Real-time251
- 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
- Smart Packages29
- Real time awesome29
- 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 Play
- Scala81
- Web-friendly architecture55
- Built on akka55
- Stateless50
- High-scalable47
- Fast46
- Open source40
- Java34
- High velocity27
- Fun24
- Lightweight9
- Non-blocking io8
- Developer friendly6
- Simple template engine5
- Scalability4
- Pure love3
- Resource efficient2
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Cons of Meteor
- Does not scale well5
- Hard to debug issues on the server-side4
- Heavily CPU bound4
Cons of Play
- Evolves fast, keep up with releases3
- Unnecessarily complicated1
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