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It works for me.

6 (31.6%)

It does not work for me.

1 (5.3%)

I'd be willing to help test it.

6 (31.6%)

I'm not interested in testing it.

1 (5.3%)

I might be willing to help test it.

5 (26.3%)

Total Members Voted: 14

[Angle]

I have plenty of money, what I need right now is advice. Does meteor.js look like a good platform to have Agora use? Are Polymer and Mongo-db techs we want to employ?

[dorf]

meteor.js is a cutting edge realtime full-stack web tech. It is also well backed up financially ($millions). I've tried it before v1.0 and I liked it very much.
I hear they like to break their API from version to version and that old tutorials will not work in newer version.
meteor.js fits Agora well.

I've never heard of Polymer, so I don't know whether it belongs with Agora or not. Can you ask the dev in what way Polymer fits into the picture? Also make sure the dev knows whether you'll be rendering the forum in HTML5 canvas/canvas3d or not.

MongoDB is well supported in a JS environment and can be used as a graph DB to a degree. Neo4j is a fully-featured graph DB which comes with a lot of graph-related functions & algorithms. It's written in Java though. Ask dev why he thinks a document-based DB is more suited for a graph forum vs. a graph DB.
MongoDB might be OK for Agora, but that depends on the use-cases and the sizes of the graph.

TL;DR: I most probably wouldn't use such a tech configuration for Agora.

That said, I'm not your lead dev, and I don't have all the design facts before me.

[Angle]

Polymer is for display. It would essentially take the place of d3, which is just as well, as d3 has been a pretty awkward fit for the things I want to do.

The reason he suggests Mongo-db is because that's what works best with Meteor. I'll talk to him about alternatives.

[BoredVirulence]

Meteor is good. I don't have much experience with it, but it is good.
Meteor would do what my fork would do. But where I would use 2 frameworks (one for the client side, another for the server) Meteor is just one.

So yeah, it seems like a fine idea. It would bring pretty much the same benefits as my fork. Except it would be more consistent.

There is nothing wrong with MongoDB. NoSQL databases generally perform only slightly worse than properly normalized SQL database. MongoDB isn't the best for performance though, redis or Cassandra would be a faster choice. Both would probably work well with Meteor. Honestly, its not too difficult to swap in another NoSQL database if required, so I don't think that its an important design decision here, they all operate similarly.

NoSQL databases are nice because they don't require you to normalize them. You can nest data structures if necessary, and you can leave a document ID and join it later. They better represent the data than a series of tables that have to be manually assembled. I do think a NoSQL database better fits your graph structure than a SQL database.

Not familiar with Polymer. I'm not sure if its necessary. I guess Meteor might not provide enough DOM manipulation for Agora. Thats why I was using Durandal, to manipulate the DOM for to make it a single page app. I'm not familiar enough to say Polymer is good or bad.


TL;DR, Meteor should be fine. I can't speak for Polymer (Nor do I see why its necessary, but I'm guessing Meteor doesn't manipulate the DOM enough). MongoDB will be fine, especially initially. NoSQL databases are quite nice, I think the model fits your data better than a SQL database, and if you need more performance you should be able to swap a faster NoSQL database in without too much effort.

If the $650 isn't breaking the bank, go for it. It doesn't look like a bad decision. Just pay him in installments so you can see work is being done.

I'll still work on my fork, slowly (I have a lot of projects I like to work on).

[Angle]

Alright, the dude set up a staging version. It's only a basic test, but here it, no java config editing required.

[Antsan]

It's working for me. Kind of. Which is to be expected, I suppose.
When entering '…' (the Unicode character, [Alt Gr]+[.] on my keyboard) the mask for entering a new topic reloaded. I cannot reproduce this, so that might have been a fluke.

[Jarvis]

So, I clicked on the red circle on the "Test" box and now it won't show up. Did I accidentally delete it?

[Antsan]

I think these red circles are for deleting. That's how I used them.

[Angle]

Those are supposed to close posts, just to get them out of the way. Right now the guy has them deleting posts, though.

[Jarvis]

I wasn't even logged in when I clicked the red circle. That should probably be changed.

[Angle]

Yeah, I talked to him about it. This is just a demonstration version, after all.

[Jarvis]

What exactly does the green button in the lower left hand corner do?

[Antsan]

If you click on a green button, it turns white. You answer to any post you marked this way. That's at least my understanding of it after playing around.

[Angle]

yup, thats for replying to specific other posts. You can check multiple to reply to multiple posts.

[Jarvis]

It seems like it could get real cluttered pretty easily if a lot of people reply to a lot of posts at once. Maybe there could be a feature where all but selected webs are made transparent for easier reading.