Welcome to issue #13 of TWiM!

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Updates in Meteor Core (MDG)

AMA with Sashko Stubailo

This is an awesome discussion between the Meteor community members and Sashko Stubailo, a Meteor Core Developer. It is meant to be like a reddit-style AMA (Ask Me Anything) and there are hundreds of comments in the posting. I highly recommend going through the various questions and answers as it may open your eyes to Meteor's vision and could potentially answer questions that you even have.

Futures Being Replaced By Promises

It is only being replaced in all run-{all,app} files for now. I am going to quote the commit message directly as it gives a good idea as to why the replacement is occurring.

Any code that has access to a Future object also has the capability of calling its .return method. Promise objects, by contrast, can only be resolved or rejected by the creator of the Promise (or any code granted access to the special resolve and/or reject functions, which are not simply methods of the Promise object). The run-app.js file contains a lot of code that used to assume a Future could be resolved by anyone, which is why the _{make,resolve}Promise methods were necessary.

For this reason, replacing Future with Promise in these two files seemed tricky and worth attempting first, before spending time converting easierfiles.

MeteorHacks Show - Arunoda & Justin

This is being placed in the Meteor core section due to the amount of discussion on Galaxy, MDG's hosting solution for Meteor applications, and the large amount of insights given on that project. This is probably one of my favorite interviews and Q&As. There is a ton of interesting discussion on Docker, Containers, and Kubernetes and why those pieces of technology are great for building this hosting solution and creating a scalable deployment setup in general. If you are at all interested in Galaxy, I highly recommend watching the entire show.

Updates in the Meteor Community

Simple Animation Examples

These are some great examples on how to utilize the _uihooks for your Blaze templates and be able to add animations to your UI very easily. It has examples with just plain CSS and then how to use a library like animate.css with it as well.

Meteor Club Q&A with MixMax

MixMax is a product that originally started out as a Meteor app and now has moved to Backbone + Express app for speed and to reduce complexity. They definitely have some great insight on various questions asked about handling data in Meteor, structuring code, testing, and much more. I highly recommend watching this Q&A.

Electrometeor - Build Desktop Apps with Electron & Meteor

This is an awesome blog post and starter pack to get you going on building desktop applications in Meteor. It currently only supports building on Mac OSX, but there is Linux and Windows support planned in the future.

Meteor Build Client

This is an awesome build tool that allows you to get only the Meteor client from your Meteor app.

Template Level Subscriptions (updated)

The template level subscriptions article on DM has been updated. The update reflects the changes in Meteor 1.0.4 with built-in template level subscriptions. It is very easy to use and as a Meteor developer, you should really know how it works.

Super Cool Alerts for Meteor

This is a great set of packages to give you access to nice looking and animated alerts for your app. This is definitely something to keep bookmarked and stashed away just in case you need it for your app.

Publish & Subscribe for Newbies

This is a great blog post on how publish and subscribe works in Meteor. It is heavily catered to beginners (which is awesome). If someone you know is having trouble understanding pub/sub in Meteor, I would say you should send them to this blog post.

Scaling MixMax - Front End Performance

This blog post by MixMax explains why they had to move off of Meteor in order to get better performance on their chrome extension app. They give some great insights on what could be improved in Meteor and why it ended up being a great tool for them to start, but in order to scale, their platform had to change. I don't blame them for changing to a more minimal backend / frontend setup, especially for a chrome extension, where performance is really needed. Although they made the switch, MixMax has nothing but positive comments when asked about Meteor and if they would use it in the future.Brad Vogal from MixMax stated:

Meteor has been a great framework for us and one we'll continue to use for other parts of our app. Meteor actually helped us bootstrap our prototype and our company extremely quickly - I'm not sure where we'd be without it. But as we built up our user base and became business critical tool for many, we just needed to go with the nuclear option and rebuild our entire frontend for performance

An Illustrated Guide to Building Mobile Apps with Meteor

This is a very detailed, step-by-step, tutorial on how to build a Meteor app that is also a mobile app. It does a great job of explaining various parts of Meteor in a very short amount of content and I highly recommend it to everyone. Beginners will definitely learn a lot from it and experienced Meteor developers can maybe find out things they didn't know before (I constantly find new stuff to learn about Meteor).

How to Organize Your Files On Your Meteor Projects

There is a lot of different ways you can structure your Meteor project and this blog posts shows a few different ways you can structure your files for success in Meteor.

Meteor Tupperware - Docker Image

This is a Docker image meant to help you build a Docker container for your Meteor application deployment.

Reactivity in the Router - Yes or No?

This is a really interesting discussion going on about the way various routers are in the Meteor community now and what is actually needed in those routers. It is really something to think about since you can have a lot of logic tied to the templates that truly use it rather than the routes themselves. I'm very curious to see what Chris Mather thinks on the matter, but there have already been two developers who have created routers that have given their opinion on the matter, Arunoda and Tom Coleman.

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

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