Meteor newbie - questions about view framework and generators

I am new to meteor (and full stack web development). Meteor seems to be a uniquely attractive option for building node apps.

I am looking for some guidance about current best practice. I’m building a website where real-time data access will be key (hence why meteor is such an attractive option). Not sure what other details I should give - I have a simple SPA in mind. For entry and display of results for school sports days. Multiple users accessing. But relatively small amounts of data.

So, my questions:

  • I’m not currently wedded to any view framework. The simplicity and tight integration of Blaze appeals. But are there better choices for meteor today?

  • Should I hold off my build until the new skeleton is released? I am not in a particular hurry. But keen to understand if this is weeks, months or years away.

  • I have seen some third party generators but they seem to be fairly old. Are there any current cli generators for creating collections, apis, views, etc? If not, there seems to be quite a lot of boilerplate to write in a number of different places for each of these tasks. Is that correct or am I missing something?

  • I have read through the Blaze tutorial and the Guide. Are there changes since these were made that I should be aware of? What’s the best way to get a handle on them.

Much appreciated. And apologies in advance if this information is already available somewhere else. I have been looking, but would appreciate a steer in the right direction.

Thanks!

Dan

Hi @dknight, your biggest choice with Meteor will be your front end, so Blaze, Vue, React, etc. might be options you to consider. For me, Vue is my favorite. It is a crowd pleaser. Blaze had the easiest integration with Meteor, but if you don’t know Blaze yet, I would skip to Vue. I’m a big fan of Meteor and a big fan of Vue, so together, you’ll have a full stack that really doesn’t have any limitations. I’m working to make some better guidance on using Meteor + Vue, but you can find starter info in this Meteor + Vue guide and you can try the Meteor + Vue tutorial.

Vue has an outstanding community & documentation which is important to consider because you’ll probably spend most of your time working on and building your front-end.

By using Meteor & Vue, you will probably write the least amount of code possible for a full stack application, but you will need to learn enough to know what is happening and when to use certain features from Vue & certain features from Meteor.

You don’t need any new skeleton code released, because you only need to add 2 packages :package: (1 from atmosphere, and 1 from npm) to use Meteor with Vue.

I would recommend to just start building your application and ask for help along the way. I’ll help you with Meteor + Vue specific questions if you are interested. There are many other members in the Meteor community who can help with Blaze or React questions.

Check out some Level Up Tutorials by @stolinski to learn more about your front-end choices. Here is a link to his starter Vue Tutorial and here is a link to his starter Meteor Tutorials.

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Thanks so much @mullojo!
Looking forward to checking out those resources.