[meteor dev] Meteor treats the server as an environment for running arbitrary privileged code. You can write server-side logic that consults third-party services, logs client writes to a separate audit trail, keeps authentication state between requests, or implements complex transactions across multiple tables. Similarly you can write code to run periodic database updates on an interval, or respond to incoming HTTP requests from other clients.
Not all apps need this stuff right away, of course, and some never do. But it's hard to do these things w/o a secure server environment for privileged code.
And then of course there's the usual tradeoffs between having control over your hosting environment (a la Meteor) and outsourced backends as a service (a la Firebase).
We're big fans of Firebase, BTW. We think more databases will move to a realtime model. Excited to check this out.
[Firebase dev] I've mentioned this in the chat several times, but I should probably mention this on the HN thread as well.
We're big fans of Meteor as well. Firebase is just a data layer -- we do high-performance, scalable real-time data sync -- but we aren't a complete Framework for building an app. Generally devs will want to use something like Meteor (or Ember, or Backbone, or Spine, etc) to help them organize their code and manipulate the DOM.
In the future we hope to have a Meteor integration, so you can power your Meteor app without running any of your own servers (and do it on a super-low-latency, highly scalable backend).
I should also mention that Firebase does let you run trusted code if you want to -- you can run a server as a Firebase client using our Node.js library or using our REST API. Then you can do anything you would normally do with a server, and still get Firebase's real-time updates.
The model is reversed in this case though, where instead of clients talking to your application server, clients talk to your database (Firebase), and your application server only ever talk to your database (Firebase). It's a bit of a conceptual shift, but we have many customers doing this in production and it works quite well.
that would be really great. I'm working on my first meteor app, building a real time project management collaboration app (old app at taskup.com written in PHP), and I would love to use firebase for real time data integration.
plug: beta at taskup.meteor.com
Not all apps need this stuff right away, of course, and some never do. But it's hard to do these things w/o a secure server environment for privileged code.
And then of course there's the usual tradeoffs between having control over your hosting environment (a la Meteor) and outsourced backends as a service (a la Firebase).
We're big fans of Firebase, BTW. We think more databases will move to a realtime model. Excited to check this out.