demeteorizer

I've been working with the framework almost daily and regarding your comments: 1.) Yep. I've gone from a jQuery-mostly front-end dev to being able to build full blown apps inside of 6 months. Not only that, the apps run really well. 2.) Incredibly. Even without the meteor.com service, it's super easy to deploy using things like Demeteorizer (https://github.com/onmodulus/demeteorizer) which strips down a Meteor app to a raw node.js app that can be deployed anywhere (that supports node, of course) in < 2 minutes. 3.) My favorite part about the framework is that the core devs have meetups/hackathons frequently to talk about progress on development, show off demos of pre-releases, and allow community devs to showcase their own work (if you're curious, I highly recommend checking out the Devshop videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/MeteorVideo

As pointed out by another user, I was annoyed as you reading the article, but the script can be used outside of their PaaS and the source is on Github [0], even though the author did not link to the repo. Typically, I have noticed the prevalence of Github and free repo hosting means people link less and less, and expect you to auto-magically find their code via Google search, or by just clicking one of the social buttons (even though the nerdier you are, the more you hate them and refuse to use them). [0]https://github.com/onmodulus/demeteorizer

Meteor does feel a little heavy (especially when you get around to deploying it) but take a look at demeteorizer, at https://github.com/onmodulus/demeteorizer It converts Meteor apps into more traditional node.js with a package.json