Meteor is an open source web and mobile development platform, simplifying the process of building applications using only one programming language--JavaScript.
What is included in Meteor?
- Server: As a full-stack platform needs a web server, Meteor runs on top of Node.js, and we get all the benefits of using the Node, such as non-blocking I/O event driven architecture, an enormous amount of open source packages via NPM, plus we don't need to switch the language from the backend to the frontend.
- Database(s): Meteor comes with MongoDB in a universal way. We get a light copy of MongoDB on the browser called Minimongo. Both the databases are in sync in real-time out of the box, which means that the UI can be updated even before the data reaches the server, and that is one of the most compelling features of the platform.
- Communication: How do the client and server talk to each other? The communication is done via DDP (Distributed Data Protocol), which is an RPC (Remote Procedure Call) protocol built on top of WebSockets instead of HTTP. Due to the bidirectional communication nature of the web sockets, Meteor is a real-time platform by default.
- Frontend UI frameworks: Meteor was using Blaze as its primary template engine, which is Meteor's implementation of Handlebars; however, it also ships with support for Angular and React currently.
Now you must be wondering how all these technologies are glued together. On a very high level, the way Meteor works is that the server publishes channels and the client subscribes to those channels, then all updates from the client can update the server in real time and the other way around--updates on the server can update the client.
Now, let's look at what else is included in Meteor:
- There is also a native for Meteor package management, called Atmosphere, where you can find tons of useful packages. Note that all Atmosphere packages will be moved to NPM in the future.
- ECMAScript 6 or ES6 is the major upgrade of JavaScript language, and you can code in ES6 in any of your
jsfiles. There is no need for configuring anything like babel, webpack plugins, dev servers, and task runners. - Any changes on the server or the client create a build automatically for you, and there is no need for browser refresh or manual server restarts.
- Throughout the book, we will be using React expect for Chapter 8, Build a Chatbot with Facebook's Messenger Platform, where we will use Angular 2. With Meteor, there is zero effort to start writing React apps. There is no need for any babel presets or anything else. The support for JSX extension comes with the default ecmascript package.
In this chapter, we'll be looking at the following topics:
- Downloading and installing Meteor
- Installing packages with NPM and Meteor
- Overview of React's API
- Creating an example application with React and Meteor