Tiny acquires Meteor

Yes, you read it correctly! Tiny just acquired Meteor couple of days ago.

For those of you who don't know it yet Meteor.js is a framework that has been around for almost 8 years and there has been lots of ups and downs. Below I'll try to get you up to speed about Meteor and what to anticipate in the near future.

Meteor primer

Meteor.js was first unveiled publicly in April 2012. In a time where most of the technologies we use today either weren't around or wasn't considered as robust, Meteor provided a streamlined experience building realtime applications in a matter of minutes with little to no configuration. It had its own template engine (Blaze), packaging system and a bundling system allowing you to ship to Android/IOS using Cordova.

Recent history

Sadly, things hasn't been going as strong for Meteor lately. Lots of new technologies started popping around. In essence Meteor has been a victim of its own success. More importantly, it didn't help out that Meteor Development Group, the company behind Meteor, decided to sidestep Meteor in favor of GraphQL and put it on life support.

Meteor had only one contributor, Ben Newman, for three years! And I must assert that he did a great job. [If one guy kept Meteor going, imagine what a team would do!]

The community wasn't thrilled about the current affair of the situation and raised this matter in a recent issue which has been culmination of increasing discontent at the situation. The morale had seen better days, though many both long-time Meteor developers and new-comers still advocate for it as an incredible prototyping tool that can get your business up in no time.

What the future holds

Honestly, I'm hyper optimistic about the future of Meteor. And I'll try to make my case as clear as possible.

• Meteor gets to have a life of its own, with a company supporting it and a dedicated dev Team.

• Many amazing developers of the community decided to band together and create an organization maintaining vital community Meteor packages.

• Typescript has been added and the core is getting converted to it one module at a time. In general, the code is being made more accessible to have more contributors on board.

• Release 1.9 is in the works to be out and it shall rock Node 12! How exciting it that?!

I humbly encourage all of you to give Meteor a try, participate in the community discussion around the acquisition, suggest new ways to improve Meteor, and maybe say hi in the community organization slack channel!

Big shout out to David Panart and Jan Dvorak for proof-reading and providing suggestion.