JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

One of the most unique and exciting frameworks out there on the web right now, Meteor is built on top of Node.js. Everything, right from the templates to the database is reactive, so any change at the client-side, or in the database is synchronized instantaneously, requiring no other measures. Meteor has quickly amassed a strong and extremely helpful community, creating a platform that you would love to build on, and give back to. Unlike other frameworks, there are no concepts of MVC or middleware (although you can implement them if it suits you). Everything is based on seven principles that act as guiding principles for the core, and the apps built upon it.

Here at OK GROW! we love tools that help us ship faster without ever sacrificing on quality. We think that Meteor could be that tool and are always excited to share our experiences and resources with anyone interested. 

If you are looking to get started with Meteor here's a short list of the things we've found helpful.

* Learning

* Resources

* Community

* Other

So you love the way single-page apps like Gmail and Trello feel, but aren’t sure where to start.  Maybe your JavaScript code has become disorganized enough that you are convinced to try one of the numerous  JavaScript MVC libraries/frameworks on your next project but aren’t sure which one to choose.  I’m writing  a book on single-page apps so I’ve pretty much “read the internet” on the topic.  I’ll attempt to provide some not so obvious insights to help you make your decision.

The frameworks discussed are the ones with the most traction at present AngularJS, Backbone, Ember, and Knockout.  Batman, CANjs, Meteor, and Spine are also mentioned but not covered in-depth.

Each project is examined from several different perspectives including community, leadership, maturity, size, dependencies, interoperability, inspiration, philosophy, and features.

Meteor is one of a new breed of JavaScript frameworks changing the way we build web apps. Tom Coleman and Sacha Greif explain how to get started in building a simple forum.

Launched in April 2011, Meteor is a JavaScript framework that's part of a wave of tools ushering in a new way of developing web apps. You know the kind: you keep hearing about them and promise yourself you'll check them out, yet never find the time to actually dive in.

Luckily we're here to help you out. So follow along, and in less than 30 minutes you'll have Meteor up and running, will be playing around with its impressive real-time capabilities, and will finally know what all the fuss is about.

The support for Accounts in the Meteor platform has left me incredibly impressed. Various accounts packages allow for the addition of account handling on the backend and on the user interface with minimal effort. Adding in support for popular authentication methods (such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) consists of adding a new accounts package.

To demonstrate, I’m going to take the simple chat application that I built in the Meteor Introduction post and extend it to use accounts instead of using a simple text input to specify the message user.

enteye is a first fully reactive Device Cloud that easily allows developers to integrate devices with a web application. You can program your boards directly from the browser, with automatic code pushes and real time data synchronisation. Based on the rapidly growing Meteor Framework it allows to change any real life thing into a reactive data source. Now your applications can have new senses that leads to totally new possibilities.

After two months of development, I can say that using Meteor and AngularJS has been a godsend, and I want to share some of the experience I gained from using them.

Meteor, IMO, is currently one of the best tools that deal with client/server data synchronization. It makes CRUD operations trivial (one line of code to create a functional model), and more complex data logic easy. Among quite a few newer data access solutions I tried out there, I would say only Firebase rivals Meteor in usability and functions, and they are ahead of others by quite a large margin. Meteor is harder to use than Firebase, but offers much more control over data.

AngularJS, on the other hand, is a more popular and well known library. It has arguably won the frontend library war against a bunch of other strong contenders such as Ember.js, Knockout.js, etc. Developing a non-trivial UI like Remonit dashboard designer is considerably easier and much more modular using AngularJS than other options.

Comparing Meteor and Angular is a bit difficult since the two are actually very different at the moment, other than they are both written in javascript. Meteor is a full stack framework/platform that runs on top of Node.js on the server. Angular is a client only framework, running only in the browser. Both are awesome, so I will try to provide a very high-level look at each, when I’ve used each, and what really stands out about each.

The one framework I always see compared to Derby.js is called Meteor. Similar to Derby, it handles things such as updating views live across multiple clients, though Meteor does it somewhat differently. While Derby is designed to be easier to use with different types of database systems, Meteor works closely with MongoDB. In fact, the client API for accessing the database is almost exactly like what you’d expect on the server-side with something likeMongoose.

While there are some drawbacks and controversies surrounding the framework (see Fibers vs Callbacks), Meteor looks like a pretty interesting option when creating an app that requires realtime feedback. Personally, I’m more attracted to the traditional callback style of programming of Derby, but the lack of robust documentation and a large developer community behind it is a huge blow to Derby’s usefulness. This will change over time, but at a much slower rate than Meteor, which recently received $11M+ in funding. This financial backing ensures that Meteor will remain around and supported, and for developers who need a financially and developmentally stable framework, the funding will only make Meteor more appealing.

Today, I want to go over how to create a really simple Meteor app. Essentially, this is a writeup for Tom’s Vimeo screencast. One major difference between my writeup and Tom’s video tutorial is the way we handle events in Meteor. Rather than copying and pasting code from one of Meteor’s examples, I take you step by step through a custom implementation of handling the enter key press to submit a message. Let’s begin!

This would definitely be the most common question that I see asked or people are wondering how to achieve a link between client and server using the Meteor.call() function.

The solution that I have found involves setting up a Future inside the server call and returning the pointer to that future to the client and then when the function call has completed, send the results to the client via the call-back from the Meteor.call() function.

Say you wanted to make a call to a server-side function and then have the result of that stored in a session variable or even used inside a template. If you tried to call Meteor.call('some_function', function(err, ret) { // use the ret variable here }); you would probably be tearing your hair out wondering why it hasn't returned the value you returned in side the call definition on the server...

The trick is using a Future on the server and then you are able to pass back the result of the call via the future making it available in the call-back method. Example is below and you can download the project via the GIST:

After reading the Discover meteor , I want to create sample web apps with meteor.js. So, I did the todo. Yes, it’s easy and can apply what we learn. I commitstep by step and it’s only 15 commits. So, if you want to learn , how I did it , you can check on the commits.

Meteor is awesome for real time web apps. It’s using DDP (Distributed Data Protocol) for real time. If you are making the real time web app, you should chose the meteor. But if you are making to show large amount of data, not recommend for my point of view.

Meteor is different with other framework. So, if you want to learn meteor , I recommend the Discover meteor book. After reading the book , you should watch the EventedMind videos.

You can check my code demo at http://learningmeteortodo.meteor.com/ and get the code from github.

Most people considering Meteor for a production deployment are wondering if it can scale. Some say Meteor is a good framework for prototyping, but not for production. After you read this article, you’ll be able to decide for yourself.

Scaling Myth

With the emergence of cloud computing (and specifically Heroku), many have come under the impression that scaling means adding more instances of an application. That’s completely wrong.

Routing, sessions, job processing, static file serving, and database optimization are key concerns when it comes to scaling, among other things. Any Meteor app that intends to deploy into production needs to address–or at least consider–these issues. On top of that, Meteor has its own issues.