The Meteor Development Group has released Meteor 1.2. The update brings ECMAScript 2015 as the official JavaScript of the Meteor platform, along with support for Angular and React.
Matt DeBergalis, founder of Meteor, said of the adoption:
We think anyone writing an app in JavaScript should be using ES2015. And it's going to drive a lot of new JavaScript adoption from developers used to other languages.
So we're all in on it: the Meteor tutorial and a growing fraction of Meteor core is now pure ES2015. We've found that it lets us write dramatically more concise and readable application code, thanks to built-in support for classes, block variable scoping, arrow functions, template strings, and numerous other improvements to the language.
"Every new Meteor project now uses ES2015 by default, in every JS file," and most importantly it will be DeBergalis said.
Alongside Blaze, Meteor's live templating engine, the 1.2 release supports AngularJS and React. DeBergalis says the React integration "is a new set of MDG-maintained packages" building on existing work, and has integrated the angular package with the the Meteor stack.
Meteor 1.2 also brings a new builds pipeline, improved mobile development with Cordova, and websocket compression using permessage-deflate.
In the community, Meteor's latest update has been warmly received. On Hacker News, user thesunny said:
Meteor+React is surprisingly good at what it does.
I'd highly recommend this new project for Meteor+React+Webpack: https://github.com/thereactivestack/meteor-webpack-react-kickstart
The only thing that I really disliked in Meteor was the reload/refresh for larger projects. This is typically a problem with anything Node related and refresh/reload times were around 10 seconds at its worst.
With the Webpack+React+Webpack, you get hot loading of only the module that has changed. Since much of the logic is on the client, your server code stays slim. Refresh times went from around 10 seconds to faster-than-I-can-notice.
Elsewhere in the community, on Reddit as well as Hacker News, while the response was still positive some were impatient for SQL support.
In the Reddit discussion Meteor just released version 1.2 with ECMA 2015 and official support for React & Angular, clessg, a full-stack CSS9 engineer, said "Meteor and React are a great combination. Can't wait for Galaxy and SQL support," adding "Great work, and thanks for being so responsive to the community."
More details about Meteor 1.2, including breaking changes, can be found in the release notes.