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  1. Stackups
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  4. Frameworks
  5. Meteor vs Play

Meteor vs Play

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Play
Play
Stacks752
Followers609
Votes496
GitHub Stars12.6K
Forks4.1K
Meteor
Meteor
Stacks1.9K
Followers1.8K
Votes1.7K
GitHub Stars44.8K
Forks5.3K

Meteor vs Play: What are the differences?

Meteor: An ultra-simple, database-everywhere, data-on-the-wire, pure-Javascript web framework. A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets; Play: The High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala. Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

Meteor and Play belong to "Frameworks (Full Stack)" category of the tech stack.

"Real-time", "Full stack, one language" and "Best app dev platform available today" are the key factors why developers consider Meteor; whereas "Scala", "Web-friendly architecture" and "Built on akka" are the primary reasons why Play is favored.

Meteor and Play are both open source tools. It seems that Meteor with 41.2K GitHub stars and 5.03K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Play with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.77K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Meteor has a broader approval, being mentioned in 195 company stacks & 156 developers stacks; compared to Play, which is listed in 112 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.

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Advice on Play, Meteor

Leonardo
Leonardo

Project manager and web developer at Revo Digital

Mar 22, 2021

Needs adviceonTypeScriptTypeScriptRailsRailsScalaScala

In the past few months, a project we're working on grew up quite fast. Since we're adding more and more features, I'm considering migrating my Express/TS REST API towards a more solid and more "enterprise-like" framework. Since I am experienced with TypeScript but not so much with Rails nor Play (Scala), I'd like to have some advice on which one could provide the best development experience, and most importantly, the smoothest paradigm transition from the JS/TS world. I've worked on some personal project with Rails, but I've found the Ruby language really distant from what the TypeScript ecosystem and syntax are, whereas on the opposite - during the brief tours I've taken in the past weeks - it's been a pleasure coding in Scala. Obviously, there are some key differences between the two languages - and the two frameworks consequently - but despite all the ROR automation and ease of use I don't despise at all Scala's pragmatic and great features such as static typing, pattern matching, and type inference. So... Please help me out with the choice! Regards

2.74M views2.74M
Comments
Hosam
Hosam

Senior Software Engineer

Apr 18, 2021

Review

If software performance is your top priority, then Scala/Play is probably best. If developer productivity is your top priority, then Ruby on Rails is the best choice in my opinion.

The Rails framework is batteries-included. The framework takes care of many things by default so that you don't have to. Logging, security, etc. It's also well-integrated; for example, controllers understand models out of the box. I had a better experience with RoR than with Play.

On the other hand, Scala and the JVM are more performant in general, so they can scale to serve more requests per second on the same hardware.

If you're considering serverless functions, then Scala is probably a better choice because it would be faster to load, giving you better economics.

53.4k views53.4k
Comments
Carl-Erik
Carl-Erik

Jan 23, 2020

Decided

This basically came down to two things: performance on compute-heavy tasks and a need for good tooling. We used to have a Meteor based Node.js application which worked great for RAD and getting a working prototype in a short time, but we felt pains trying to scale it, especially when doing anything involving crunching data, which Node sucks at. We also had bad experience with tooling support for doing large scale refactorings in Javascript compared to the best-in-class tools available for Java (IntelliJ). Given the heavy domain and very involved logic we wanted good tooling support to be able to do great refactorings that are just not possible in Javascript. Java is an old warhorse, but it performs fantastically and we have not regretted going down this route, avoiding "enterprise" smells and going as lightweight as we can, using Jdbi instead of Persistence API, a homegrown Actor Model library for massive concurrency, etc ...

374k views374k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Play
Play
Meteor
Meteor

Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

-
Pure JavaScript;Live page updates;Clean, powerful data synchronization;Latency compensation;Hot Code Pushes;Sensitive code runs in a privileged environment;Fully self-contained application bundles; Interoperability;Smart Packages
Statistics
GitHub Stars
12.6K
GitHub Stars
44.8K
GitHub Forks
4.1K
GitHub Forks
5.3K
Stacks
752
Stacks
1.9K
Followers
609
Followers
1.8K
Votes
496
Votes
1.7K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 81
    Scala
  • 55
    Built on akka
  • 55
    Web-friendly architecture
  • 50
    Stateless
  • 47
    High-scalable
Cons
  • 3
    Evolves fast, keep up with releases
  • 1
    Unnecessarily complicated
Pros
  • 251
    Real-time
  • 200
    Full stack, one language
  • 183
    Best app dev platform available today
  • 155
    Data synchronization
  • 152
    Javascript
Cons
  • 5
    Does not scale well
  • 4
    Heavily CPU bound
  • 4
    Hard to debug issues on the server-side
Integrations
No integrations available
AngularJS
AngularJS
React
React
MongoDB
MongoDB
Node.js
Node.js
Apache Cordova
Apache Cordova

What are some alternatives to Play, Meteor?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Bower

Bower

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

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