Integrating Expressjs or towerjs with meteor

Question

We are building a web app, and were evaluating to use meteor. At this point meteor does not do much at the server side. ex there is no routing layer, controllers, ORM etc.

So my first question is are these features expected in future?. Is it going to provide a full stack web framework like Rails.

At this point if we need to use meteor we need more features on the server side. So is it possible to integrate server side mvc web frameworks in meteor like Express , towerjs, railways etc with meteor? Or the other way, can meteor be integrated into such frameworks.

Answer 1

Routing and a form of ORM are on the roadmap. You can already write "controllers" in the sense that you can expose methods through Meteor.methods which can be called by the client and handle objects in the database.

As Lance said, Meteor is a full-stack framework but it's still under development. If you want to use Meteor but find it's incomplete, I recommend waiting and using something else (like Tower or Express) in the meantime.

Answer 2

Meteor would be a good alternative to looking for if natively allowed to build npm projects and modules as well. It is the same to ignore all community from Node.JS and all supported resources made so far and made something very restrictive and maybe incomplete in short and middle times.

You also have to consider that Meteor is very new and incomplete, as Rahul and Lance said. And you also need to consider the approaches Meteor tries to reach is to build a different kind of web sites, perhaps more like web app instead of traditional web sites.

Anyway we must watch Meteor project, keep a look on it and see new coming updates.

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I guess you can't combine Express with Tower.JS - Lance correct me if I'm wrong - but I know you can integrate Express with DerbyJS as well.

Answer 3

There's a Meteorite package that provides express for use with Meteor for developing REST APIs and the like (Disclaimer: I'm the author)