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What is Isobuild? The blog post doesn't actually say, and Googling [meteor isobuild] just turns up the blog post.

(Is Isobuild the tool that implements "proper single loading?")



I too was disappointed that the blog post doesn't go into any detail about unibuild.

One of the best and only explanations of isobuild is in this talk by Geoff Schmidt, one of the founders of meteor: http://youtu.be/EZUfQ1zA_NM?t=11m33s

  [iso]build
  Like 'make' or 'scons' but for distributed systems.

  One source tree
  One package system
  Multiple languages
  Multiple targets
  Multiple architectures


I think that this notion of _generality_ that meteor embraces is essentially the struggle for platform relevance. I take isobuild to mean iso-platform, one platform to rule them all. Take the discussion in the video about DDP. It's like "get on board people, we've figured it out!"

There is a tension between generalities and specifics, between abstraction and things that are concrete. I don't doubt that having a solution that satisfies everyones hopes, dreams and desires would be awesome, but I feel tension when I work on meteor apps. It feels super easy to code up demos (generalities) and then once you get into the business of building out complexity you bang into trouble. It's almost as if the underlying platforms percolate up and clamor to be heard, if you stray from that meteor happy-path.


I feel this way too sometimes, but I've come to relate it more to the fact that Meteor is relatively new, and the community has collectively built relatively few complex apps, so the documentation, available blog posts, Stack Overflow questions and answers, wikis, books, tutorials and videos just aren't really in place yet for that kind of architecture.

There are more and more solutions and patterns emerging every day as more and more people try building complex stuff in Meteor, though. Just look at some of the packages by Arunoda like fast-render, subs-manager, and kadira: all designed to ease development around common bottlenecks you run into as you start to scale up.

In other words, I think this problem will eventually go away as more people keep trying.

Just like it did with Ruby on Rails 8 years ago :)


In fact, it was explain in the post but was removed a few hours later (perhaps too much info on one news).

It was about the fact that you can code the same way on server, browser, mobile.

Example was that you can use Http package everywhere with the same function and have the same result.

And the other example was the Cordova integration. The build system can generate the code for the whole distributed system (not just the browser).


(MDG-er here) Yup, we decided to break it into two parts! Expect a blog post on Isobuild very soon.



(MDG-er here) Expect a blog post on Isobuild very soon... :-)




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