We live in amazing times. Advances in medicine, communication, physics, and all other scientific fields provide us with opportunities to create things that were literally impossible to create only a short while ago.
And yet, we aren't easily amazed. We've come to expect wondrous advances, and therefore what was once amazing becomes…well…expected. It's a rare thing, indeed, to find something that takes us by surprise. Something that renews that childhood sense of wonder we all secretly want back, because it was stolen from us.
Well, prepare to regain some of that wonder. A dedicated group of computer scientists who are determined to make something wondrous have created a new JavaScript platform called Meteor. You may be thinking, "A new JavaScript platform? That's nothing special." And if that's all Meteor was, you'd be correct, but fortunately for you, that's not the end of the story.
Meteor is a reactive, simple, and powerful application platform, capable of producing sophisticated, robust web applications with just a few lines of code.
In the context of web applications, it is state-of-the-art. Using established, proven development design patterns, Meteor takes all the difficult and mundane parts of building a web application and does them all for you. You get to focus on building a solid application with all the latest innovations such as reactive programming, templates, plugins, and client-side caching/synchronization. You get to do all of this without getting bogged down in the usual time-wasting activities, such as writing yet-another-database-interface, or learning a new templating engine.
And the best part is, it's simple to learn. Amazingly simple. You will see an application come to life right before your eyes, and when you look back at the number of lines of code it took to create, and compare it to the traditional methods of development, you may actually find yourself saying "wow" or "how did they do that?"
This book will walk you through the major features of Meteor, and show you how to create an application from scratch. By the end of the book, you will have created a working, useful application, and you will have a solid understanding of what makes Meteor different. It may sound like hyperbole, but if you're open to the idea that something innovative and unexpected can qualify as amazing, then prepare to be amazed!
Chapter 1, Setup and Installation, gets you up and running with Meteor in just a few minutes, and shows how quickly and easily you can build a fully functional, useful application.
Chapter 2, Reactive Programming… It's Alive!, teaches you all about reactive programming, and how you can leverage reactivity in Meteor to create amazing, responsive applications.
Chapter 3, Why Meteor Rocks!, helps you to gain an understanding of the design patterns Meteor uses, and shows examples of these powerful patterns in action.
Chapter 4, Templates, teaches you about Meteor templates in depth, and how to use templates to lay the groundwork for your Lending Library application.
Chapter 5, Data, Meteor Style!, helps you to discover how Meteor handles data, making an enterprise-level application incredibly simple and robust. It also helps you to implement Meteor's data handling quickly and effectively in your application.
Chapter 6, Application and Folder Structure, shows what changes you can make to the default configuration to make your application more secure, extensible, and user-friendly.
Chapter 7, Packaging and Deploying, helps you to become an expert on Meteor's packaging system, including how to include many popular third-party frameworks. Learn how to deploy a Meteor application to your development, testing, and production environments.
To run the examples in the book, the following software will be required:
Operating System:
Mac: OS X 10.6 and above (http://www.apple.com)
Linux: x86 or x86_64, Debian (http://www.debian.org) and Red Hat-based systems (http://www.redhat.com)
Meteor: Version 0.5.0 or above (http://docs.meteor.com/#quickstart)
This book is for an application developer, designer, or analyst with a decent understanding of HTML and JavaScript, and who wants to learn about Meteor, and the new movement inside the JavaScript community towards fully-functional, robust web applications.
If you are looking for a step-by-step approach to understanding how and when to use one of the latest and most innovative web technologies in your application development projects, this book is for you.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We've already created our categories through the use of the categories template."
A block of code is set as follows:
<body>
<div id="lendlib">
<div id="categories-container">
{{> categories}}
</div>
<div id="list">
{{> list}}
</div>
</div>
</body> When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<body> <div id="lendlib"> <div id="categories-container"> {{> categories}} </div> <div id="list"> {{> list}} </div> </div> </body>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
> meteor remove autopublish
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Before we celebrate, go ahead and click on the Clothes category."
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