Hello everyone,
We are pleased to announce Meteor 1.1 today, the latest release of the open source Meteor platform. Meteor, which lets developers build modern web and mobile apps on a single JavaScript codebase in a fraction of the time and cost otherwise possible, is for the first time now available as an official distribution on the Windows operating system. Meteor 1.1 also includes support for MongoDB’s new 3.0 database engine and adds many improvements throughout the stack.
The Meteor 1.1 release is fully compatible with Meteor 1.0 and newer; we encourage all Meteor developers to try it out and update your apps. On each of Windows, OS X, and Linux, the Meteor installation comes with everything you need.
Get started now at Install Meteor.js | Meteor API Docs.
So welcome to our Microsoft friends!
Let’s start with Windows. The Meteor 1.1 release adds first-class official support for developing applications software on Microsoft Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2012. A native installer includes all the key parts of the Meteor SDK, including Windows-specific Node.js binaries and the MongoDB database engine.
This work is the start of a commitment to developers on the Microsoft platform, getting you on equal footing with those who use Meteor on OS X and Linux. Our Windows changes go beyond just the basics of developing a Meteor apps on a Windows computer. We’ve taken care to make sure teams with a mix of development platforms can collaborate on an app; a single Meteor codebase will work unchanged on any combination of Windows, OS X, and Linux computers. We’ve added Windows machines to our build farm, so package authors – on any platform – can publish their libraries for Windows developers right alongside builds for OS X and Linux. And you get all your favorite parts of the Meteor toolchain on Windows, including the meteor mongo database tool, meteor shell, and access to our free application hosting servers using meteor deploy.
Looking ahead, we are eyeing integrations with Visual Studio (which recently gained better JavaScript support), Azure, and other parts of the Microsoft ecosystem. Please let us know on the Meteor forums what you’d most like to see.
Next up, MongoDB. Last month saw the release of MongoDB 3.0, a major rewrite that brings massive improvements to MongoDB’s performance and scalability thanks to a new WiredTiger storage engine. Meteor (beginning with the 1.0.4 release) supports both MongoDB 3.0 as well as the older MongoDB 2.6. You can use either engine in production with a Meteor app. Meteor ships with MongoDB 2.6; we will keep a close eye on the maturation of MongoDB 3.0 and transition to it as the default MongoDB engine in a future release.
Meteor 1.1 includes many other improvements throughout the stack. The biggest addition is a new constraint solver, the piece of Meteor that determines the correct version of each Meteor package to include in a project, akin to Ruby’s bundler tool. The solver is now based on MiniSat, a flexible open-source SAT solver written in C++ (and compiled to JavaScript for use in Meteor!), improving both the performance and predictability of 1.0’s solver.
As always, you can review the full list of changes in 1.1 and previous 1.0.x releases in our release notes. Enjoy!
– @slava, @sashko, @avital, @dgreensp, @glasser, and the rest of the Meteor team
