Meteor!

Rocks! From outer space!

(Am I playing with fire here? John Allsopp preaches against these trends, and despite my rising from the exact same background, influences, Brooks, Dijkstra, et al, I sense there’s maybe a counter-intuitive paradigm shift exemplified in Meteor‘s opinionated stack, that merits exploration, at least.)

(Meteor version 0.6.5.1.)

Highlights

1. Opinionated: choices made already, take it or leave it.
2. Tight integration. But, what’s new? Commercial services have always leaned away from pluggability (interoperability) and towards completeness (isolation, creeping featuritis, etc).
3. Single page Web applications (SPA): no middle tier, business logic moves to client, cloud is just storage (nu, and RESTful services, mashed up).
4. Persistence, or distributed storage, or offline?!
5. Scaffolding (meaning asset pipeline, etc)
6. NoSQL (ERDs ain’t the problem — it’s the tables, query language, schemas!)

Getting started

1. Installation
   1. Shell script? Yuck. No APT package, but NPM (and peers) seems veered towards self-managed installations? Still…
   2. From GitHub? Using Meteorite (after npm install meteorite):

      $ mrt

2. Design
   1. UX (on paper, yet hard work, with SPA, RWD, etc)
   2. Data modeling (NoSQL, but reactive, offline?)
   3. Widgets and templates (DOM recycled unexpecedly), pages?
3. Scaffolding
   1. Create project:

      $ mrt create src

      then just run Meteor:

      $ cd src
      $ meteor

      ($ mrt also works) and open the app at http://localhost:3000/. Delete the “meteor” section from smart.json to skip checking for updates to Meteor every time we run it with mrt.

   2. Directory structure (under project’s root)
      1. client/: assets (automatically minified and combined) sent to client (browser). Subscriptions?
         1. views/
      2. lib/: collections?
      3. packages/
      4. private/
      5. public/: assets?
      6. server/: publications?

…

Bookmarks

Resources

1. Official: Meteor, meteor/meteor · GitHub, meteor/meteor Wiki
2. Meteorpedia
3. oortcloud/unofficial-meteor-faq · GitHub
4. Meteorite by oortcloud and Atmosphere: Smart Packages
5. Made with Meteor!
6. meteor-talk – Google Groups
7. Newest ‘meteor’ Questions – Stack Overflow

Examples

Lots listed at Made with Meteor!…