Welcome to issue #15 of TWiM!
If you would like updates like this emailed to you, subscribe at thisweekinmeteor.com
Updates in Meteor Core (MDG)
MDG Raised $20M in Series B Funding
This is a fantastic announcement! MDG now has $20M more to build out Galaxy and the Meteor platform! It mentions that part of the funds will be to create official solutions for integrating other popular front end frameworks like Angular and React. I think that is a great move and will definitely help push more people to adopt Meteor as their platform. This makes a total of $31.2M in funding for Meteor so far and there is a very bright future ahead.
Meteor and Galaxy of Containers with Kubernetes
This is a great blog post that explains a bit about Galaxy (MDG's paid hosting solution) and how it will work with containers and, more specifically, Google's Kubernetes. It gives a great overview of Galaxy and I recommend reading it.
Angular & Meteor as a Great MEAN Stack
First off, congratulations to Uri Goldshtein for joining MDG. He has been working hard on integrating Angular and Meteor with his Angular-Meteor package. So, he goes through and explains in this blog post as to why it is a better decision to use Meteor as your backend for a typical MEAN stack application. For those of you that don't know, MEAN stands for Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node. You can can use Meteor to make up for 3 out of the 4 (all but Angular). And this integration with Angular fills that gap and allows you to build MEAN applications in significantly less time and code. To quote the blog post directly:
Let’s compare number of code lines, client and server (with the same HTML templates):
Thinkster’s Javascript lines: 532
angular-meteor’s Javascript lines: 80
That is a significant amount of code that is not needed to write. Thinkster, for those of you that don't know, is a very popular educational site that gained a lot of popularity for its Angular courses.
Fast Click was Updated to 1.0.6
The fastclick library was updated to fix a bug in iOS safari. Just something to be aware about for those building mobile apps.
Cordova Updates
Meteor core has quite a bit of Cordova-based updates coming in. Important highlights:
- Cordova has been upgraded from 4.2.0 to 5.0.0
- Cordova Android dependency has been upgraded and uses the Gradle build system instead of Ant
- You can now add local Cordova plugins with file:// URIs
There are more updates, so if you are interested, read the commit.
The User.profile field will be deprecated
This is a branch created by Sashko Stubailo to deprecate the use of profile. The use of the profile attribute in Meteor applications has actually been a bit of a problem. It has various security implications and other issues that developers should take into serious consideration. There is a hackpad proposal for this very issue. I recommend taking a look at it if you haven't already.
Updates in the Meteor Community
Scaling Meteor to 20,000 Users in 7 Days
This is a fantastic blog post by our very own David Woody about scaling a Meteor app that was worked on recently. It goes into detail about various tips to help you scale and things to look out for. I highly recommend reading it and sending it to any developers asking you about scaling a Meteor application.
Another Accounts Package for Meteor
This package, which I believe is called s-id, is a slightly different approach to an user accounts system than the user-accounts packages. It is a bit more minimal and doesn't do much styling for you. It is another package to consider especially when you are choosing which user accounts wrapper to choose.
Salezy - iOS App Built with Meteor
Usually, I don't post personal products on TWiM, but this is an edge case. The author of the app does a great job of explaining why Meteor was a great choice for him and various tips for people building mobile apps in Meteor. I highly recommend reading his long description on Crater. It is basically a mini blog post within the submission.
SpaceTalk App - Open Source Chat Application
First, there was Telescope, now there are more open source Meteor-based projects spawning. This application is meant to be kind of like an open source alternative to Slack. I'm excited to see the development of this project further.
Slack Invite Package
This is a package that helps you easily add in a form to send invites for your Slack team. All you have to do is add in your Slack Token and then insert the template {% raw %}{{> slackInvite}}{% endraw %} to your template.
How to Add a Model Layer to your App
This is an awesome tutorial by David Weldon on how you can use Meteor's API to build out a model layer and add methods to your collections. I highly recommend reading it as it can really help you with building modular Meteor apps.
xolvio:private-packages
This package makes it easier to manage private packages. Currently, that is a bit of a problem in Meteor, but it isn't that big of an issue (in my opinion). This package allows you to point to a private GitHub tarball or even local packages. You should note that it wants you to use the NPM package mgp instead to manage your private packages though due to issues in the build process.
Nullchat - Open Source Meteor Application
This is another great open source Meteor app. It is a chat system and it has some interesting features like the Giphy integration and a meme generator.
Meteor Basics Tutorial
This is a very short and simple tutorial on getting developers started on some of the Meteor basics. It gives code examples and shows benefits for using Meteor.
Let's Talk about Deprecating Spacebars
This is a very interesting discussion on spacebars, Meteor, and also Evan You talks about his branch that integrates spacebars with React. It is a very long thread, but definitely worth the read. I recommend that everyone should read this.
Meteor in the News
This is a special section this week to highlight where Meteor has been featured due to it's big $20M announcement.
InfoWorld
Venture Beat
TechCrunch
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
