I’m looking at using the meteor framework for some upcoming projects and have a few basic questions on best for updating the database from third party sources. A great deal of the data I will present to end users will be pulled in from other sources on a schedule, eg if I was making an app to display cars for sale and I was wanting to retrieve and update the list of cars for sale from an external source. I’d like to pull the data into a model to persist the model. I was initially thinking of just having a seperate process to pull in the data then save it to the database without using models. What’s the best way to accomplish this so I can pull them in as models to ensure they follow the same orm format that will be used by the rest of the meteor app? Do I simply do a setInterval task in a seperate node process that updates the datastore or is there already a meteor solution that performs this kind of server side task management out of the box?
There are a number of scheduler packages. Take a look at:
(there are others).
Dang that was the fastest reply I’ve ever had on any forum. Is the meteor forums always this active??
I’ll also ask, one of the projects I am looking into meteor for was going to have some disparate monitoring servers which I was thinking would all talk back to a central meteor sever. I was going to have them run their own simple tasks that would communicate back to the main server by socket.io and then meteor would be used for the central management site for the user facing site. Is meteor an appropriate product to look into for the other servers which would be an api-only server whose purpose is to fetch external data then push it back to the main server? Could it be beneficial for meteor to run on those other servers as well? Can meteor be used for this sort of architecture with disparate systems needing to communicate with each other?
At the end of the day, a production Meteor app is just a Nodejs app. Having said that, Meteor comes with its own websocket based protocol (DDP), which you may find useful whether or not you use Meteor for the monitoring servers. There is a package which you may find useful here. It allows a simple Nodejs app to leverage Meteor Methods and pub/sub.