Welcome to issue #11 of TWiM!

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Updates in Meteor Core (MDG)

Meteor Hack Week - REST APIs with Meteor

This is a hackpad to help develop an easy way for a Meteor developer to build a REST API. To quote the hackpad directly:

Meteor should be the easiest way to make a REST backend for anything

I think that is an awesome goal to reach. Currently, you have to use packages to accomplish that, but it would be great to have an official package that also integrates with the way you build DDP communications.

Throwing Exceptions on Meteor Methods

This is a PR that adds a throwStubExceptions option to the Meteor Method calls that allows the exceptions in the method stubs to be thrown instead of logged.

Updates in the Meteor Community

Discover Meteor is Ready for Windows

Discover Meteor is now ready for Windows users! So, if you have a Windows machine and want to learn Meteor from the book or have friends that have Windows, refer them to DiscoverMeteor now. You can get them 20% off by using this link.

Using ReactJS as a View Layer for Meteor

This is an good blog post on how you can utilize React as your view layer in your Meteor application. There are a lot of tutorials on how to do just that and this is another to add to the collection.

Meteor Interviews: Chris Mather

Chris Mather is the creator of Iron Router and EventedMind. He has made some huge contributions to the Meteor community. In the interview, they talk about how Chris Mather got to where he is today, how he got started with Meteor, and how EventedMind got started. Chris goes through and talks about how a little bit of time everyday to learn a core concept can really help you develop faster and develop more efficient solutions to problems. There is a lot of great discussion about Meteor, router options, and much more.

This is a fantastic interview and I highly recommend it to everyone.

Velocity 0.6 Released

Velocity has a lot of changes in this release. This release comes with Windows support for Velocity. The stability has been greatly improved. They have also added the ability to debug your tests.

Adventures in Docker Land

This is a great blog post where the creator of Dominus talks about working with Docker to create a scalable deployment setup for the Meteor project. There are a lot of great details on setting docker up and the docker file required to create this setup. Also, it goes through on how to setup logging and statistics for your Meteor app.

MeteorJS - A Server-Side Developers Experience

This is a fantastic blog post about the experience of using Meteor from the perspective of a server-side Java developer. It has some really great insight. It points out both pros and cons for using Meteor and developing apps in it. I think this is a great article to send to your friends who like developing in Java or currently use it at work as it can give them a great personal perspective on Meteor.

Meteor MySQL Server

This is a package released by Ben Green, the author of the meteor-mysql and meteor-pg packages, that allows you to run a MySQL server instance within your Meteor app.

Scaling MixMax - From Monolithic to Microservices

This is an awesome blog post by the people at MixMax on the challenges they faced on scaling their Meteor application. MixMax is a very popular Chrome add-on that adds extra functionality to Gmail. They talk about how they took their app and turned it into micro services and scale each micro service separately.

Telescope Slack Channel

You can now invite yourself to the Slack channel dedicated to Telescope! Go to the link, put in your email, and you should get an invite in your email.

Kubernetes: The Future of Cloud Hosting

Kubernetes is Google's solution for managing clusters of containers. The MeteorHacks team talks about how it works and benefits of using it. Unfortunately, I cannot summarize this article as it is quite large and contains a lot of different information. But, I think it is an important article to read because it can help you understand containers and how you can utilize this system to create a scalable deployment setup.

Meteor Postgres Package

This is another package to allow you use use Postgres database. Although, this package actually have a minisql implementation that uses alasql.js along with some customized Meteor-specific code to create a "minisql" on the client. It is super interesting and I think there is a lot of potential with it. Maybe it could help pave the way for further SQL implementations.

Other News

Nitrous.io Silently Advertises Meteor

If you go to the link above, the code in the IDE screenshot / example has Meteor code in it. So, Meteor is growing in other places as well and getting advertised!

That's all for this week! Tune in next week for more updates in the Meteor universe.

If you would like updates like this emailed to you, subscribe at thisweekinmeteor.com