It hasn't all been roses; I've had plenty of obstacles to overcome as I've learnt the framework, its capabilities and its limitations, but the community has been helpful and I can honestly say that working with Meteor is on the whole very slick.

https://atmospherejs.com/ is your close friend. Iron Router is a very, very close friend.

Good luck!

Don't get me wrong, I love working with React.js, but it isn't a framework and aspects like dealing with data, API's and other more functional aspects can take a lot of time to get working with React's way of thinking. React also requires a certain degree of glue-fu to get it to the same place something like Angular, Ember or Meteor seems to be. I think Meteor could be a nice down-the-line framework. For my next project, I'll give it a shot. I have a friend who has been building something with it and he seems to absolutely love it.

Having said that, if you want to use React and Meteor after reading through the documentation it seems they make it easy to integrate with other libraries and even frameworks. I even saw they mentioned you can use Meteor with AngularJS (which is crazy), but cool nonetheless.

A talk demoing it: https://youtu.be/puoD7b4Ow7k

Here's how to integrate AngularJS with Meteor: https://github.com/Urigo/angular-meteor

A talk demoing it: https://youtu.be/s6IgKYsZAyI

With everything in a predictable location and following the same patterns, code is more intuitive to reason out.

There are actually a handful of good scaffolding options for Meteor. But once you understand Meteor's special treatment of some folders & files, and the basic CRUD stuff then you will be hooked and scaffolding will not be a big thing :)

Meteor has always seemed interesting but the fact that it is hosted makes it a non starter. There's too many scaling questions that a marketing site will never put me at ease, I'll need to see some solid case studies and ideally a company sponsor of some sort dogfooding it.

Maybe for an MVP? And even then, I have a hard time justifying it over mocking my data and using something like angular to speed up front end. Maybe I'd use it in very narrow use cases.

Meteor is exclusively not hosted by Meteor (company), you are wrong. You -can- use their free hosting because it's useful to just get an MVP online as quickly as possible.

You can host a Meteor app wherever you can host NodeJS.

What do you mean?

:)

The source code is very well annotated also.

Meteor is modular enough that you can swap out current pieces if you want to, but you're certainly not expected to do that (and if you're just getting started with Meteor, it's almost discouraged). And there are plenty of benefits to just using Meteor for everything -- e.g. Meteor creates a "minimongo" interface on the client that lets you re-use your MongoDB queries on the client.

One way to grok this is to compare Meteor to Django. Just as you can swap out Django's default homegrown templating system with Jinja, you can swap out Meteor's default homegrown reactive frontend with React. But you certainly don't have to and neither Django's or Meteor's devs expect you to.

There's a more thorough discussion of Meteor's various parts here: http://joshowens.me/what-is-meteor-js/

You can read more about that here: https://www.meteor.com/projects

1: https://www.meteor.com/install

Meteor is kind of isomorphic, but not in a very useful way. It does not do server-side rendering unless you include the hacky phantomjs module, last I checked.