While Meteor and Derby deliver similar functionality, the approach used by each is so different that people will likely choose one vs. the other based on the style of programming they are used to.
Meteor: Meteor is a tightly integrated full stack framework where you program in a synchronous style. Meteor will likely be the solution of choice for people who want to build real-time applications in pure JS in a synchronous style.
Derby: Derby on the other hand also delivers a real-time development framework. However, Derby allows you to program in Node's traditional asynchronous callbacks style. Derby will likely be the solution of choice for developers who want to build real-time applications in pure JS using an asynchronous style.
I intentionally glossed over feature differences because the approach of each team is different enough that people will likely select one vs the other based on preferred programming styles (assuming neither team drops the ball...unlikely given the skills of the devs on each team).
SailsJS: It's also worth mentioning SailsJS b/c they are delivering the rapid development benefits of Meteor and Derby, but from a vastly different approach. Sails has a very cool evolutionary design and is a project worth following.
The big win for developers will be that these teams (and I'm sure other will emerge) are pushing the boundaries of development speed. This genie is now out of the bottle.
The other thing that's obvious is that there's a gaping hole for someone to fill with a package-oriented approach vs. the framework approach. True, Meteor/Derby/Sails are all a bunch of packages, but what I mean is there is an opportunity for someone to collect a bunch of standard NPM modules into a comprehensive development environment. The end goal would be to deliver similar benefits as a framework, except that devs would have no abstraction layers to deal with (more complex, but more power).
SignalR: One last solution to mention. For .NET devs, Microsoft released SignalR.
> Have you tried similar frameworks like Derby (http://derbyjs.com/)? If so, can you compare your experiences?
I tried Derby.js because of one important for me missing feature of Meteor: serverside HTML rendering - required for search engines and also for CMS or content like applications. IMO Derby.js got it right there.
Unfortunately Derby.js is seriously lacking professional documentation of any kind: Meteor already has books and 2 very good and long enough video courses (from pluralsight and tutsplus)
