The Meteor year 2015 in review

Finally it’s the end of the year 2015.

With this blog post we want to look back at the year and see what happened in the Meteor community the last 12 months.

Meteor 1.1 is released

The year started great when Meteor announced Version 1.1 with official Mongo 3.0 and Windows support.
This release was huge as it opened the Meteor platform to a bunch of new programmers who are familiar with the Windows operating system and were not forced to use a virtual machine anymore to run Meteor on their system.

Package authors welcomed the Windows world as well as packages such as kadira were updated quickly so that they can run on any operating system smoothly.

Mongo 3.0 support was another milestone. The new WiredTiger storage engine rethinks how data should be stored and makes Mongo much more scalable and fault tolerant database choice.

Meteor moves beyond Rails on GitHub

We were all excited when Meteor finally to the first spot as the most starred web framework on GitHub.

Meteor even moved beyond Ruby on Rails, the all time classic.

Right now Meteor has more than 30k Stars and it’s adding more an more stars on a daily basis!

Galaxy launches

There were rumors about a hosting system optimized for meteor applications all the time.

2015 was the year when the MDG finally announced the release of Galaxy, a hosting platform optimized for Meteor applications with a great feature set.

Large companies were invited to test the new hosting platform in advance and help the MDG test out Galaxy in every detail.

Some of us were a little bit confused when we saw the pricing at first but later a developer plan followed with an affordable pricing model even for small projects so now everyone can use Galaxy to deploy and scale the Meteor app with a simple meteor deploy command.

Meteor partner program

More and more enterprises consider Meteor as an alternative to other existing technology stacks.
Because of this movement the Meteor partner program was developed.

Everyone interested in professional Meteor development can now take a look at the Meteor website and find skilled and trustworthy developer agencies and consultancies which are specialized in Meteor development and certified by the MDG.

$20m series B funding

The MDG got another funding round with a $20m series B funding.
This might sound not that spectacular for a developer but it’s another proof that Meteor is not “yet another fancy JavaScript framework” which will be deprecated the next year.

Investors are confident that Meteor is the next Platform for developing cutting edge web applications.

Meteor welcomes Percolate Studios

Everyone who has used Atmosphere to dive through all the thousands of Meteor packages has stumbled upon Percolate Studio (as they are the developers behind Atmosphere).

In 2015 Meteor welcomed Percolate as it’s now a part of the Meteor development group.

Meteor 1.2 is released

This was one of the release I personally was very excited about.

Meteor 1.2 uses ES2015 as the default JavaScript version (by embracing babel.js).

Additionally Angular and React were introduced as the officially supported 3rd party view libraries.

Rumor has it that React will be the go to choice for the next Blaze release. So it might be a good idea to take a closer look at React.

Meteor global distributed hackathon

The “Meteor global distributed hackthon” was a huge event for every Meteor enthusiast.
People from all over the world gathered to celebrate Mereor and participate to create great software built with Meteor.
MDG was kind enough to lead this event and provided prices for the participants.
Many developers took this advantage to connect with others and form teams to realize interesting Meteor projects with a range of different topics.

Meteor guide is started

The Meteor guide was started as a go to point for every Meteor developer (Whether he / she is new or confident with the Meteor framework).
The guide is the standard for every Meteor developer when it comes to Meteor best practices and patterns.

Xolv.io hands ownership of testing back to the MDG

Xolv.io which was one of the early developers of the great Velocity testing framework decided to hand the responsibility of everything testing related topic back to the MDG.

Testing is another important topic in the Meteor roadmap and thanks to the great work of the Xolv.io guys and the community this might be integrated into the Meteor platform as a first class functionality in the upcoming releases.

As you can see this was a huge year for everyone involved into the Meteor community. We’re all excited about 2016 and the upcoming Meteor journey.

What was you highlight this year?

The JustMeteor team wishes you and your loved ones a peaceful and healthy start into the New Year 2016!