While I did not necessarily feel like I was hit on the head by “a small body of matter from outer space that enters the earth’s atmosphere, becoming incandescent as a result of friction and appearing as a streak of light,” I can certainly say that I wish I was a few times. Meteor, so much like life, has given me its ups and downs. It provided me with many emotions, and a new kind of emotion whose word I only came across today: pisstified, the feeling of being pissed off and mystified at the same time.
Just recently this week, only a few days ago, I had tried to run Meteor on my laptop. I typed in meteor npm run start into my projects directory- changing nothing beforehand, installing nothing beforehand, only for it to popup an error.
Meteor RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded
The error would run anytime I attempt to use the keyword ‘meteor’, and it’s not an environment variable error. I uninstalled meteor, restarted my laptop, installed meteor, restarted my laptop, checked, same error. Then I tried uninstalling Meteor, NPM, NodeJS, then restarting my laptop, reinstalling everything again restarting, and the same result. I also read around and tried manually uninstalling anything Meteor related (after the uninstall from Windows 10’s Program Manager), NPM related, etc. The same result. Research and trial for error repeated itself for around 5 hours while the size of the meteor I wanted to come crashing down on me slowly increased.
Eventually I ended up installing Ubuntu onto my system, with some help of a few friends who just so happened to have Ubuntu on a USB already. A few heart attacks and scares and weird problems later, it finally got installed, and I had to go to work.
No Meteor practice was done that day.
Other than that one problem, there were no other terrible problems that I’ve experienced that can’t be filed under the “it’s just what will happen to a person while learning a new framework” cabinet. Most of my problems simply comes down to remembering what files exactly needs to be updated whenever I add and reference a new file, and that imports are a thing.
Meteor is definitely a cool framework. While I’m not a fan of Javascript, the templating is very interesting. Having done a bit of things with Android Studio- even if it’s Java and XML- templating plays a very important role in dynamic page design. Meteor does so even better because you can directly implement conditionals, similar to how you’d make a dynamic page in PHP, within the HTML’s markup. It’s not entirely unique to Meteor sine Django and Laravel provide that same feature, but the templating allows the programmer to have multiple levels of organization on their project design.
I haven’t done too much research into Django or Laravel yet so I cannot say for certain whether or not similar or the same features exist within them, and even if they do, that will not take away from the fact that I think that it’s very neat that Meteor offers that capability.
Good lord. I suppose just like how when I just walk out of a theater, I would only ever be extremely critical or extremely satisfied. Rarely an in-between.
This time, I was very critical. I didn’t like how so many specifications and imports to the same file had to be made, and how it seemed like everything was everywhere. I honestly felt like should I ever start a project on Meteor myself and that it was going to be a larger project, that I would have an extremely hard time maintaining the project if I ever took a break from it and forgot my project’s architecture.
I would not call myself a fan of Meteor nor a hater of it, but if I ever had to choose a web framework, I think I would choose something like Laravel. Primarily because I feel like I would have more freedom and have an easier time maintaining the system since it’s more widely based on how I built the project rather than being forced to conform to how Meteor reads things.