Why do websites like Classcraft not use Meteor for their Frontpage

Question

I was looking at some larger scale Meteor applications and was wondering why some of the initial sites do not seem to use meteor.

As an example when you go to classcraft and look at the main website you notice it is not using meteor.

Then when you go to their actual application (click signup for example) you can see it uses Meteor.

So they make a clear separation in terms of technology. Can someone explain the reasons? Is it not as efficient / clean to just use Meteor for the whole thing.

Thanks, Jean

Answer 1

Each company makes their own decisions on how/when/where to use technologies. In the case of meteor, the really strong part of meteor is that it's real-time updating. That means things like messaging systems, getting updates out quickly, etc. good uses for meteor.

It appears as though classcraft has decided they don't need that capability on the home page. There's also some concerns with SEO and meteor that perhaps classcraft didn't want to deal with.

Finally the home page not being built in meteor shields the DB from public view, which is not a huge security advantage, but may be one they considered.

This is all me finding reasons for them as I don't know why they'd make that decision. I don't make that decision for my sites/apps but that doesn't mean others might not see things differently.

Answer 2

I'm the founder of Classcraft. To answer your question, it's because we didn't need everything Meteor had to offer for the front-facing website : reactivity, flexible templates, a database, etc. Meteor is amazing for building apps, but it's overkill for a static website. Also, if the front-facing website was built within the game app, it'd mean that any copy changes or tweaks to the front-facing would cause us to have to redeploy the app, which means some downtime (not much, but still) for our users. Keeping them separate also allows marketing people (who aren't developers) to tinker with it without going into the code base for the game.

We decided to build the front-facing website using middleman. Middleman allows you to generate a precompiled static website, which allows for amazing speed and simple server configuration (it's served from S3, which means it's super fast).

I'm sure the reasons are different for everybody, but that's what it was for us.

Shawn