Book Image

Getting Started with Meteor.js JavaScript Framework

By : Isaac Strack
Book Image

Getting Started with Meteor.js JavaScript Framework

By: Isaac Strack

Overview of this book

<p>Meteor is a brand new platform built entirely in JavaScript that allows you to build modern, dynamic web applications in the blink of an eye. With support for nearly every popular JavaScript framework (and more being added every day), Meteor provides you with the ability to quickly and easily develop sophisticated and stylish web applications.<br /><br />"Getting Started with Meteor" is an easy to follow, step-by-step approach to learning how to build modern web applications with Meteor. Through the development of a complete and ready-to-use application, you will experience exactly how easy and fast it can be to develop robust, flexible web applications, so you can build your own “killer” app in no time.<br /><br />"Getting Started with Meteor" will walk you step-by-step through all the major advantages that Meteor has to offer. You’ll be up and running in less than two minutes, and will develop an actual application you can use. As you move quickly through the exercises, you’ll be able to experience first-hand how easy it is to develop in Meteor, and will gain invaluable best practices you can apply immediately to your coding projects.<br /><br />You will learn about reactive programming and how Meteor takes advantage of the latest web technologies. You will gain a solid understanding of what&nbsp; the best design patterns are for developing web apps, and when to use them. You will learn how Meteor uses HTML templates and NoSQL (document-based) databases together to make coding applications simple and fun. Finally, you’ll gain best practices for security and performance, making your web applications fast, secure, and easy to use. If you want to build a web application but hate how difficult it seems to be, this book will show you the easy way to build and deploy modern web apps.<br /><br />This book will teach you everything you need to know to get up and running with Meteor, and start you on your way to becoming an expert web applications developer.</p>
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Modern web applications


Our world is changing.

With continual advancements in display, computing, and storage capacities, what wasn't possible just a few years ago is now not only possible, but critical to the success of a good application. The Web in particular has undergone significant change.

The origin of the web app (client/server)

From the beginning, web servers and clients have mimicked the dumb terminal approach to computing, where a server with significantly more processing power than a client will perform operations on data (writing records to a database, math calculations, text searches, and so on), transform the data into a readable format (turn a database record into HTML, and so on), and then serve the result to the client, where it's displayed for the user.

In other words, the server does all the work, and the client acts as more of a display, or dumb terminal. The design pattern for this is called…wait for it…the client/server design pattern:

This design pattern, borrowed from...