Preface
Web is inevitably one of the core reasons for the advancements that we experience today almost everywhere. Though the development of Web and its content has been happening for quite a long period of time, the current decade is very significant, especially for JavaScript. When people started writing JavaScript in servers, the language became truly universal. Apart from Web, JavaScript has found its way into IoT devices too, which is considered to be the most opportune.
The potential and traction of JavaScript has brought countless developers into developing JavaScript-based applications, frameworks, and utilities. Even after evolving so much, JavaScript application development is deficient in certain areas. Developers are spending time on doing repetitive tasks, such as data fetching, wiring them to views, posting data back to servers to persist, and so on. Moreover, it is required to speed up the data transfer that is slow in the case of HTTP and HTTPS. Keeping all these traditional problems in mind, a bunch of developers developed a solution called MeteorJS.
MeteorJS provides most of the things that a developer would have to do repetitively, out of the box. The developers need to concentrate mostly on business logic rather than spending time on the basic data fetch and transfers, optimizations for network latency, syncing of data across devices, and reactivity.
There are already plenty of developers and organizations using MeteorJS in production. Many are experimenting with MeteorJS to make it the de facto framework for their future work. This book is written with the intention to guide those who are experimenting with MeteorJS to develop their future applications.
The best part of the book is that it doesn't just cover Web application development. It helps to write maintainable MeteorJS applications and deploy them to production. In short, the book aims at guiding the developers to develop production-ready, mobile-compatible, and horizontally scalable MeteorJS applications.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Building a MeteorJS Web Application, provides an introduction to developing a Web application using MeteorJS. Readers will develop a multipage, multilayout application in this chapter, which gives enough insight about MeteorJS components and routes.
Chapter 2, Developing and Testing an Advanced Application, helps you rebuild the same application as in the previous chapter, but using a generator and other advanced packages to ensure the app is of good quality. Every possible way of debugging the entire application and testing the code is discussed in this chapter.
Chapter 3, Developing Reusable Packages, shows that packages are very important blocks for any MeteorJS app. This chapter shows the reader, with a typical example, how to develop and test custom packages and also provides the steps to distribute them for community use.
Chapter 4, Integrating Your Favorite Frameworks, guides the readers to use Angular.js and React.js with MeteorJS. MeteorJS has its own view layer managed by Blaze. However, many developers want to use their favorite frontend framework instead of Blaze. How powerfully d3.js can be used with MeteorJS is demonstrated with examples in this chapter.
Chapter 5, Captivating Your Users with Animation, shows how animations improve the user experience to a great extent. With all the in-built reactivity of MeteorJS views, many developers struggle to find ways to incorporate animations. This chapter walks you through creating soothing animations with a lot of examples.
Chapter 6, Reactive Systems and REST-Based Systems, helps us understand the reactivity of MeteorJS to its depths and the precautions needed to handle reactivity. Also, this chapter discusses how to use MeteorJS as a REST-based system for consuming API.
Chapter 7, Deploying and Scaling MeteorJS Applications, teaches you to deploy, monitor, and scale MeteorJS applications, as MeteorJS is not so familiar in terms of deployment.
Chapter 8, Mobile Application Development, helps you understand that one of the most important features of MeteorJS is to write once and build for multiple platforms. Developers can write code that can be ported as a mobile application in MeteorJS. This chapter will guide you to develop an app for a mobile using MeteorJS.
Chapter 9, Best Practices, Patterns, and SEO, discusses various best practices to design, develop, and maintain MeteorJS applications, and also the best patterns to follow in order to organize the code and structure modules. This chapter also guides you to make the application search engine friendly to improve the sites ranking. With this chapter, readers will get to know where to find anything related to MeteorJS.
What you need for this book
You will need the following things to understand the content of this book:
Node.js
NPM
MeteorJS
iron-cli
MeteorJS hosting platform
Cordova, iOS, and Android devices
Who this book is for
This book is for developers who want to develop MeteorJS applications in a mature and maintainable way. The readers are expected to know the basics of MeteorJS such as the core principles, templates, server and client code positioning, and basic directory structuring. A little knowledge about querying MongoDB will help very much to understand data fetching from MongoDB. It is assumed that the reader has developed small example applications with MeteorJS.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Create the bookTravel
directory in the client and add bookTravel.html
."
A block of code is set as follows:
data: function() { templateData = { _id: this.params._id, bus: BusServices.findOne({_id: this.params._id}), reservations: Reservations.find({bus: this.params._id}).fetch(), blockedSeats: BlockedSeats.find({bus: this.params._id}).fetch() }; return templateData; }
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
Router.route("/book/:_id", { name: "book", layoutTemplate: "createTravelLayout", template: "bookTravel", waitOn: function () { Meteor.subscribe("BlockedSeats", this.params._id); Meteor.subscribe("Reservations", this.params._id); },
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
iron add velocity:html-reporter
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Cart division in the top-right."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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