Meteor RPCs look cool, I've only started to see this elsewhere in frameworks like Solid.js. Was Meteor the first web framework to do this kind of seamless backend calls from the frontend?
It was certainly the first big framework to do it. The phrase at the time was "isomorphic javascript" - i.e. javascript that could run the same on server and client.
While today I might re-use _some_ code, like helpers or TypeScript types for API responses, by and large I feel like that dream is unrealized and probably a never great dream in the first place. In practice there just weren't a ton of wins from doing so, as there were not many cases where you needed the same code in frontend and backend.
This is not at all what RPCs were. And plenty of frameworks use "isomorphic javascript" (i.e. Javascript on both the front-end and the backend) -- Next, Nuxt, and many others.
Thank you for the correction, apologize if I muddied the waters. I didn't use meteor and only saw it from a distance. I do however use Next/nuxt/etc, and you're right that SSR/SG is a good counter-example to my point. I will say that outside of SSR/SG, isomorphic javascript isn't used that much in my experience. But it is a great counter-point for sure.
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Meteor RPCs look cool, I've only started to see this elsewhere in frameworks like Solid.js. Was Meteor the first web framework to do this kind of seamless backend calls from the frontend?
It was certainly the first big framework to do it. The phrase at the time was "isomorphic javascript" - i.e. javascript that could run the same on server and client.
While today I might re-use _some_ code, like helpers or TypeScript types for API responses, by and large I feel like that dream is unrealized and probably a never great dream in the first place. In practice there just weren't a ton of wins from doing so, as there were not many cases where you needed the same code in frontend and backend.
This is not at all what RPCs were. And plenty of frameworks use "isomorphic javascript" (i.e. Javascript on both the front-end and the backend) -- Next, Nuxt, and many others.
Thank you for the correction, apologize if I muddied the waters. I didn't use meteor and only saw it from a distance. I do however use Next/nuxt/etc, and you're right that SSR/SG is a good counter-example to my point. I will say that outside of SSR/SG, isomorphic javascript isn't used that much in my experience. But it is a great counter-point for sure.
For the uniformed, like me, here's a meteor RPC - https://guide.meteor.com/methods.html