Welcome to issue #12 of TWiM!
Sorry for the delay on this issue. I wanted to wait for various talks that were occurring on Thursday such as the Meteor Devshop & Telescope refactoring.
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Updates in Meteor Core (MDG)
Meteor Featured in Gartner's Cool Vendor Report
Meteor has been featured in the Gartner "Cool Vendors in Application Development, 2015" report. This is awesome! Meteor is gaining more and more traction as time goes on.
Blaze Memory Leak Fixed
There was a memory leak occurring in Blaze and rather than me try to describe it, I'll just quote the commit directly and it should give a good idea of what was going on:
This leak occured whenever a DOM element with attributes got removedfrom the DOM without destroying its containing view.
If you want more details, check out the commit and the detailed information in the commit message.
Rethink & Meteor
Slava Kim, a core developer at MDG, is building a rethinkdb integration with Meteor on both the server and the client. This video goes through and demos what he has done so far and it's a great thing to see.
Easily Build REST Endpoints with Meteor
This is a set of packages built by Sashko Stubailo to help you build REST endpoints from any Meteor methods and publications you have available. The goal is for Meteor is be the easiest tool to build a REST API. I highly recommend adding this package to your Meteor app if you are looking to expose a REST API for your users or for your other applications built on the same server. You can also use this as a great selling point to help people convert over their current apps to Meteor and slowly transition to the DDP world. :)
Blaze + React Branch
There is a branch on Meteor called experimental-spacebars-over-react which is an integration of React and Blaze. It is being worked on by Avital and Evan at MDG. From what I can see, it is meant to be a very tight integration and seems to use React's rendering engine over Blaze, but integrates with the rest of Blaze. I'm curious to see where this branch goes in the near future.
Updates in the Meteor Community
Meteor Interviews #6: Ben Berman - Native iOS Apps with Meteor
Ben Berman, from Workpop, talks with Paul Dowman about how Workpop went about building a native iOS app and how it integrates with their Meteor server. They talk about how they originally used the objective-ddp package, but then later switched to the meteor-ios package due to the extra features you get by using that integration instead. It is a very interesting interview and can give you a lot of insight on building a native mobile app with Meteor. I highly recommend listening to it.
Meteor-Up for Windows
You can now use MUP (Meteor-Up) on Windows and deploy to your servers easily. For those of you unfamiliar with MUP, it is an easy way to deploy your Meteor app to custom servers. If you want to learn more, read more here.
Accounts-UI Mailcheck
This is a fantastic new package that gives the user suggestions if they mistype the domain for the email address. So, if a user types in user@gnail.com it will suggest user@gmail.com to the user. It's a simple package, but it can help your end users a lot.
Template Animations
This package is a wrapper to Meteor's _uihooks that allows you to easily add animations to your templates. It is very easy to use and can really help you add some nice effects to your Meteor apps.
Heroku now supports Meteor fully!
Heroku added in sticky session support into their deployments which makes it fully Meteor compatible. So, look out for Heroku build packages for Meteor and deploying your applications there!
Building Cross-platform Desktop Apps with Meteor & Electron
This is a great article that shows you step-by-step on how you can build a simple cross-platform desktop application with Meteor and Electron. This is a great place to start and can hopefully shed more insight on how to build larger cross-platform apps with Meteor.
Build your own /r/button with Meteor
This is a great and simple tutorial on how to build your own version of /r/button in Meteor. This is by Rahul from Q42. It is very easy to follow and great for Meteor beginners.
React Native + Meteor using JavaScipt DDP
There was a React native & Meteor integration that used a iOS-based integration, but this one is using JavaScript DDP. What this means is that it is using a websocket polyfill to allow for this and allows you to communicate directly in the React Native JS code that you are writing with the Meteor server. This is great and a huge step for those trying to build native apps in React native without having to change from Meteor.
Meteor For Windows - Getting Started Guide
This is a great starter guide for Meteor developers that are on Windows. It goes through the basics and how to install and use Meteor on your Windows machine. It is a great resource to send to your developer friends that use Windows as their primary platform.
Telescope Refactor
Sacha Greif talks about a lot of the changes coming up in Telescope. It is taking a whole architectural change by moving all of the code into packages and separating those packages into modular components so that developers can pick and choose what features they want to use in their telescope instance. I highly recommend watching this talk as he also answers questions that could be prevalent to your Telescope app today or in the future.
Meteor Devshop - How DDP helps improve iOS Application Architecture
Note: The beginning of the video does not contain audio, but it does come in later. I believe there will be a new video uploaded for this talk containing the audio.
Martijn Walraven does a great talk at the Meteor SF devshop about how Meteor can be used to build native iOS apps. He talks about how he went about building meteor-ios package and the benefits of using DDP over typical HTTP calls to build your iOS applications faster. I highly recommend watching this portion of the devshop as it can help give you better insight on building native apps with a Meteor server in place.
Meteor Devshop - A look at reactive PostgreSQL
This is a talk given by Ben Green, a Meteorite known for building various database packages, about his PostgreSQL package. He talks about the various implementations for it and how to use it. Ben also talks about how the MySQL and PostgreSQL packages work generally and what larger issues still need to be solved.
Upcoming Events
Meteor Hacks Show - May 6th, 2015
In this Meteor Hacks show, Justin (from MDG), will be joining Arunoda to talk about Docker, Meteor, and deployments. Justin works on Galaxy at MDG and has been doing a lot of experiments with Docker & Meteor. I think it will be a great show to watch.
AMA with Sashko Stubailo - May 5th, 2015
Ask your questions to Sashko and he will answer them on Tuesday, May 5th.
That's all for this week! Tune in next week for more updates in the Meteor universe.
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