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A few months back I decided to give some time to both Derby and Meteor. Derby appealed because of the packaging, but Meteor obviously had the media traction. I gave 10 days to each to see what I would learn and build.

After the 20 days my biggest problem was with Derby and trying to make progress as the community and support just wasn't there. Of course you might think that one shouldn't complain about this, but its important for the uptake to have clear documentation (it starts well), guides and people involved etc. I think it was Nate that would answer my stupid questions on IRC when he had time, but other than that I was on my own and the feeling I got from others was the same...

Normally I would just read the source, but it was in coffeescript ( glad that Derby has now moved to plain Javascript), and it just wasn't enjoyable when I wanted to integrate with my own datasource from a custom JSON backend - not just another NoSQL database, but an API I know well. I got it working and so forth but it did make me wonder why the hell I bothered and rm'd the git repo.

Doing the same exercise using Meteor the first thing that struck me at the time was their community. The second thing was I was having fun again, and thirdly it was less effort as long as I didn't leave the path too much. But the fact that it didn't have auth and that my datasource was completely exposed and that I couldn't use existing packages was a downside. So I put both to bed.

I hope Derby is getting greater traction and a community is starting to form around it. I also hope that the move to Javascript will make some of the design decisions clearer.

In a few months I will probably give one or other a proper project to work on.




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