Companies like Google and Facebook have done an awful lot of work to make their internet apps feel just as snappy and responsive as the software that runs directly on your PC, letting us, say, follow constantly-updating online timelines or track our Lyft rides in real time.
The internet giants make this sort of thing look easy, but they have deep pockets and huge teams of engineers at their disposal. For the little guys, building similar interfaces can take months or even years, says Geoff Schmidt, the software developer behind the coding-tools maker, Meteor.
Schmidt would know. He helped build Asana, a task management application masterminded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and former Google engineer Justin Rosenstein. Moskovitz and Rosenstein knew that in order to be successful, Asana needed to be just as fast using a desktop app. People just wouldn't wait around for the application to sync each change with the server. So before they even began coding the actual task management features, Schmidt and company spent months building their underlying framework. It was hard. "This is a challenge up there with building Unix or Windows," Schmidt says.
Schmidt thinks it's a waste of time for companies to build these same foundations again and again, which is why he founded Meteor, which builds an open source web programming framework that anyone can use to build complex, desktop-style applications in the browser. "The idea of Meteor is that everyone should have that stuff," he says. "It shouldn't take a couple years to get to the market."
Meteor, which officially launches today, uses JavaScript, the standard programming language for writing applications for web browsers. Meteor apps can run on phones, tablets, desktops or anywhere else that a standard web browser can run. But unlike other JavaScript libraries like Angular or Backbone, Meteor lets coders build the server side pieces of their applications with JavaScript as well. That cuts back on the amount of coding developers need to do, and makes it easier to put the more of the complex pieces of the application on the client side, which is great for making applications more responsive -- and making them work offline.
>We noticed that everyone at Y Combinator was struggling to do what we were doing
Meteor is part of a growing number of tools aimed at making it easier to build real-time applications, such as the cloud database Firebase, which was just acquired by Google, and other frameworks such as Derby, co-created by former Google engineer Nate Smith, and Yahoo's Mojito. These projects all play into a larger shift towards running applications locally, and syncing data with the cloud, as opposed to having the entire application run on a web server somewhere.
Schmidt didn't set out to create a programming framework when he left Asana. He and his co-founders Matt DeBergalis, who co-founded the fundraising service ActBlue, and Nick Martin, who co-founded music streaming company MixApp, originally planned to make a travel recommendation app. The trio was accepted into the prestigious startup incubator Y Combinator, and it was there that they built the original version of Meteor to power their own product. "We noticed that everyone at Y Combinator was struggling to do what we were doing already because we had experience from these companies like Asana," Schmidt says. "So we realized that our framework for building this stuff was way more valuable than our travel guide."
The team released a developer preview of Meteor in 2012, and within hours of being posted to Hacker News, a popular online hangout for developers, the framework was downloaded several thousand times. But getting people to use a free software platform is just the first step for a venture-funded company like Meteor. It also needs to find a way to make money. Schmidt says the company plans to offer a cloud hosting service specifically tailored for Meteor apps. The company already offers free, experimental hosting for Meteor apps, but Schmidt says it's not suitable for live, business-grade applications.
In the meantime, Meteor has maintained some of that early momentum, according to RedMonk analyst Donnie Berkholz. "Meteor has grown in popularity over the last couple of years as backend JavaScript continues to gain interest as an alternative to other languages," Berkholz says. Based on the data he's gathered from Google Trends and developer-centric sites such as Hacker News and StackOverflow, Meteor is by far the most popular of the "full-stack" frameworks, which seek to handle both the browser and server sides.
Meteor still has a way to go in terms of replacing the old ways of building apps, but it's still early for Meteor and even though it's just now emerging from beta, many companies are already building applications with it. For example, Lookback, a startup co-founded by former Spotify engineer Jonatan Littke that makes a platform that helps developers capture videos of mobile applications. "Meteor affects about 75 percent of our code," Littke says. And although Meteor was fairly immature when Lookback started using it it two years ago, Littke says, the framework has come a long way.
Even Schmidt is surprised by this kind of early traction. "I think the fact that people have gotten so far with Meteor despite it being pre-1.0 speaks to how great the need is for something like that," he says.
