I am part of a free, non-profit bootcamp in London called Founders & Coders. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be running a one-day workshop for our students to introduce them to the awesomeness that is Meteor. Before I plan the workshop, I wanted to get the Meteor community’s opinions on something.
My initial plan is to show off how quickly you can get up and running - I’ll demonstrate how we can create an app with a database with multiple collections and user accounts / 3rd party auth etc. etc. etc. - all before lunchtime.
Beyond that, the reason for this post is to ask all you wonderful Meteor users out there what the most mind-blowing features / packages are for you. What are the features, big or small, that made your jaw drop? What has saved you the most time? What’s the coolest package on Atmosphere? What sold you on Meteor?
Data on the Wire. Meteor doesn’t send HTML over the network. The server sends data and lets the client render it.
One Language. Meteor lets you write both the client and the server parts of your application in JavaScript.
Database Everywhere. You can use the same methods to access your database from the client or the server.
Latency Compensation. On the client, Meteor prefetches data and simulates models to make it look like server method calls return instantly.
Full Stack Reactivity. In Meteor, realtime is the default. All layers, from database to template, update themselves automatically when necessary.
Embrace the Ecosystem. Meteor is open source and integrates with existing open source tools and frameworks.
Simplicity Equals Productivity. The best way to make something seem simple is to have it actually be simple. Meteor’s main functionality has clean, classically beautiful APIs.
These truly are the main takeaways and I believe the meteor tutorial does a decent job demonstrating them together.
We did a Meteor presentation to a group of about 30, and I wanted to quickly make a demo app which could allow them to participate and experience the real-time nature and collaborative potential.
We created this “spots” app, and deployed it to meteor.com. Everyone in the room was able to connect via their notebook computer or mobile phone. Touching the screen created a “spot” which was pushed down to everyone else’s view. Each person’s spot is a different color.
It’s a simple app, but useful to demonstrate how Meteor works as you can explain how the “spot” is first created locally, in the mini-mongo database, and the template reacts automatically, then it’s pushed to the server, where the data is pushed down to subscribing clients, etc.