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hoodie-vs-meteor.md

Hoodie vs. Meteor

Preface: Not a Meteor Expert. Please comment with improvements.

Paraphrasing philosophy:

  • Hoodie, Look ma! No Backend.
  • Meteor, Backend Power on the Fronend.

A couple of high-level observations:

  • Hoodie empowers UI/UX people to build full apps without any backend experience or backend experts.
  • Meteor empowers developers build apps faster.
  • Hoodie focusses on frontend APIs that are hooked up to a generic backend.
  • Meteor brings backend APIs to the browser.
  • Hoodie is offline-by-default and mobile friendly by treating in-browser-storage as a first class citizen and using asynchrnous, on-demand data exchange, that is real-time when network is available.
  • Meteor focusses on always-on real-time networking between client and server.
  • Hoodie stops shy of where jQuery, Backbone, Ember, Angluar and friends start. You can pick your preferred frontend stack.
  • Meteor comes with a frontend framework. (might be compatible with others, lacking expertise here)
  • Hoodie uses CouchDB in the backend for data reliablity and sync.
  • Meteor uses MongoDB.
  • Hoodie uses NPM for modules.
  • Meteor has a custom package manager.
  • Meteor has been public for about a year, with a great community, VC funding and all.
  • Hoodie is newer and still in developer-preview, but starting to attract interest, contributors and some sustainable business already.

Similarities

  • Open Source Licenses: MIT (Meteor), Apache 2.0 (Hoodie).
  • Full JS Stack, browser in the front, Node.js in the back.
  • Fast prototyping of apps.
@gr2m
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gr2m commented Apr 14, 2013

I've no opinion on meteor, but seems to be super cool! From my understanding, the goal is to get rid of the borders between frontend / backend, to make the same code run in both environments. Right?

We have a different approach. We've started by dreaming the perfect frontend API to hide away tasks that need some kind of backend. Then we've implemented it with CouchDB and Node.js, because that's what was the simplest for us. Backend might as well be implemented PHP, Java, you name it. I, as a frontend dev, don't care, really. All I want is a method like sendEmail( emailObject ), that should do what it says and don't bother me with technical details and limitations.

It's a lot of magic & illusion. Some people don't like that. But lots of people do, apparently :-)

@janl
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janl commented Apr 14, 2013

Give us a bit more time to refine hoodie, but I have a bad time defining hoodie through another project. I don't think it helps much either. Please let me know if you disagree :)

There is more in-depth info at http://hood.ie/intro.html in happy to answer more questions, maybe that is easier.

@max-mapper
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I'm giving hoodie a shot on a new project because it is built on top of projects that I am familiar with (node.js, npm, couchdb) in a way that doesn't abstract away any of the underlying communities. Instead of forking a community and building their own, hoodie is building on top of existing successful open source projects in an additive way. It's hard to express the business value of these decisions, and caring about them probably makes me look like every other beardy open source programmer on the internet, but I think the philosophical goals of hoodie are fundamentally different from meteor.

@davidascher
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I'm not looking for a 'hoodie is better than meteor' because of X, i'm hoping to build on my understanding of meteor's approach and understand the ways in which hoodie is different. Think of it as teaching spanish to a french speaker.

I'll keep poking.

@janl
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janl commented Apr 15, 2013

@davidascher Got it, looks like I don’t know french enough to get it right :)

@ile
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ile commented Jul 26, 2013

Some more questions. Maybe this will help to think about the differences?

  • Suitability for mobile apps? I believe Hoodie can do this easily (?), I don't know about Meteor.
  • Multi-page apps/routing? I believe Meteor can do this, don't know about Hoodie?

BTW, are there any more examples than my-first-hoodie?

@AdamGerthel
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Hoodie does seem more like Firebase than Meteor - would that be accurate? I haven't used Hoodie, but it looks very similar in terms of usage.

@niallobrien
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I'm currently exploring both so here's some quick observations:
Hoodie is front-end agnostic, Meteor is not. Yes, you can use Angular with Meteor for example, but that's just replacing Meteor's Blaze framework, which is kind of pointless.
It would be much easier to use Ionic Framework with Hoodie due to this same reason. Meteor seems to reinventing the wheel as most libraries have to be wrapped for use.
Hoodie is more like Firebase in my opinion but still requires work for proper scalability.

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