Is Meteorite still relevant now that Meteor 0.6.0+ supports npm packages?

Question

Since Meteor 0.6.0+ supports npm packages directly, is Meteorite still relevant, and would there be any advantage/disadvantage to using it?

Answer 1

Meteorite is definitely still relevant and recent talks from meteor team indicate it will be folded into meteor itself eventually.

Meteorite does more than NPM, it also takes client side 3rd party libraries and specifies how they get integrated into a meteor app. In this aspect it serves the same purpose as yeoman/bower. 3rd party client side libraries like x-editable, sugar.js, moment.js, etc dont really belong in NPM, but you also shouldnt have to manually incorporate them into your meteor project either. See this comment from the meteor team: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/516#issuecomment-12919473

Meteorite doesnt provide the full functionality of NPM. With just meteor, you cant just require a NPM package in your app and use it, even in 0.6.0+ you still have to make a package and an api wrapper. If you wanted to use a certain NPM and it was already wrapped and shared on meteorite, that would in effect provide a NPM 'proxy' via a meteorite package. Like this package https://atmosphere.meteor.com/package/ncp

I would suggest using meteorite for the capabilities you gain beyond meteor itself. However, be aware that this is an area in great flux so you may have to rework/adjust your project in the near term. IMO if you are building more than simplistic apps, you'll definitely want meteorite for the ease of incorporating 3rd party libraries.