Is Meteor equipped to handle an app composed mostly of HTTP calls and promises?

Hey everyone,

I’m currently working on a proof of concept for an app that would heavily consume a third party REST API. The development effort on my end would be the web app itself, as well as a backend that would manage users/projects/etc., but most of the heavy lifting would be done by REST calls to a third party API.

So, I have two big questions:

  1. A ton of the app revolves around making HTTP calls to the API, and actually chaining calls together. So far I’ve been trying to attempt this with promises using the okgrow:promise package, but trying to render the results of Meteor.promise into a Blaze template has proven next to impossible. Is this just a necessary complication of using HTTP in Meteor? Or using promises? Or (way more likely) is there a missing piece in this process that just makes everything easier.

  2. Is Meteor even the right tool for this? It really feels like I’m basically sidestepping most of the benefits of Meteor by not actually doing much with the Meteor server piece and instead just building a front-end. Granted, Meteor is still very user friendly and there’s a lot of convenience to be had, but I can’t help but feel like there might be a better tool for the job given how reliant I am on a REST api.

Any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks