I've just started building the app I've been trying to build for the last 5 years again. I'm on about version 29 now. I've tried jquery, ember, angular, native android all with REST (which I found to be a complex time-sink), grpc (has potential but a bit too non-standard/bleeding edge), and was just looking at swagger when I came across the FB stack of react, relay & graphql. This is like heaven.
No more faffing around with marshalling/demarshalling and such a simple API code generation on client & server aren't even necessary. Plus, react makes the UX incredibly responsive and in future I should be able to use the same server as a backend for native IOS and Android apps which I'm hoping should be pretty quick to chuck together once I've worked out the business logic for a website. It's like a different world since last time I did front end work, and I think this time I might actually be able to create the app I want to, while having something that's maintainable and boiler-plate free. Thanks Facebook!
I tried meteor shortly after it was released. It wasn't clear whether there was a path to making a native app and it felt like there was quite a lot of magic going on. I wasn't sure I'd get the security right and wasn't clear on whether it could scale beyond a single server. I preferred the idea of REST because I could drop in caching proxies etc and knew it was stateless. Of course, things might have changed now.
I guess there's no parallel for react-native though, which is really the killer feature for me. GraphQL & Relay are really the icing on the cake.
No more faffing around with marshalling/demarshalling and such a simple API code generation on client & server aren't even necessary. Plus, react makes the UX incredibly responsive and in future I should be able to use the same server as a backend for native IOS and Android apps which I'm hoping should be pretty quick to chuck together once I've worked out the business logic for a website. It's like a different world since last time I did front end work, and I think this time I might actually be able to create the app I want to, while having something that's maintainable and boiler-plate free. Thanks Facebook!