Welcome to issue #16 of TWiM!

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Updates in Meteor Core (MDG)

Optimistic UI with Meteor

This is a fantastic blog post by Sashko Stubailo, a core developer at Meteor, about how Meteor enables "Optimistic UI" updating. In short, due to the way data flows in Meteor, the user can get an instant response from your application and then if something does end up going wrong, it will give them an error. I highly recommend reading the blog post, it goes in some depth about it and is a good ideal to keep in mind when building any application with a UI.

What does it mean to be a Real-Time Database - Meteor SF Devshop

Slava Kim, a core developer at Meteor, talks about Meteor's architecture and how the data flows. It is a really great talk and he does a fantastic job going into enough detail to properly explain what an "Optimistic UI" is. Then, he goes on to talk about his work on the RethinkDB package and how it compares with the way Mongo / MiniMongo is implemented in Meteor currently. It is very interesting and I highly recommend watching this if you want to learn more about how Meteor works and modern real-time database architectures work.

Updates in the Meteor Community

Meteor Reactivity for Nested Objects

This is a great new package that allows you to have reactivity on nested objects. It exposes a simple API and can be very useful for some developers.

Scopemount Theme Galileo

This is another great free theme created for Telescope-based projects. It is really great to see people creating themes for Telescope and I hope as other open source Meteor projects spawn, they take this same model to allow for easy customization.

Telescope Homepage Redesign

Speaking of the Telescope project, Sacha has been hard at work for the past couple weeks with refactoring the open source application and now he has added a whole new design for the website. It is really nice and has some more features like a one-click deploy button.

Meteor Routing and Layouts

This is a great tutorial on the basics of routing in Meteor and using that functionality to also render appropriate layouts and templates. It shows the examples with Iron Router, but you could easily port those examples to use another router like Flow Router. This is a good tutorial for those having trouble understanding how routing works with the UI since this is very focused on just that.

AMA with Arunoda Susiripala

Arunoda, for those of you that don't know, is a very active Meteor community member and has contributed various projects such as Flow Router, Kadira, BulletProof Meteor, and many more. I highly recommend reading his responses to these questions. It isn't something I can summarize unfortunately.

Meteor UI Pattern - Keeping App State on the URL

The MeteorHacks team wrote a blog post that explains why it is important to keep your app states managed by the URL. It is a very interesting article and I personally believe it is a good pattern to follow for most cases. I think all Meteor developers should read this, it is something to keep in mind while developing your apps.

Meteor SQL and Other Databases

This is an awesome article by the people at Compose.io, a production-ready hosted database solution, which talks a bit about the Meteor platform and the continuous advances on database support for Meteor. It is very well written and goes through newer packages like the Meteor-PostgreSQL integration and RethinkDB. This can easily be viewed as another good endorsement for Meteor. :-)

Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe

This is a blog post that goes through the issue of storing API keys other "secret" information that you should not be exposing to the user. In order to solve that, you can use a settings.json file. Pete Corey shows you how to implement and use it in your Meteor application.

Meteor and Backbone

The great people at MixMax wrote a blog post on how they implemented a reactive front end in Backbone that hooks up to their Meteor backend. It is going to turn into an open source Backbone library for anyone to use. I see this as a really big integration. Backbone is very widely used, especially in larger corporations. If they can slowly convert their back end system to Meteor, then be able to use an open source library to make their Backbone-based front end real time easily, it can potentially be feasible for them to port over. I see this adding on to other communities around front end libraries like Angular and React. It just goes to show you how powerful and flexible Meteor's architecture is.

SpaceTalk 0.1.0 is out!

The first version of SpaceTalk is released! The best description / summary of the project thus far is given by Tim in the crater description. To paraphrase the quote:

It's been two weeks since I first started this project, and now we're at 15 contributors, 86 stars on Github, 52 forks, 56 PRs, 46 issues and 168 people on Slack. I'm amazed at what this community can achieve in such little time. Feel free to join the chat during my demo at http://spacetalk.meteor.com.

Meteor SF Devshop - May 2015

If you missed the dev shop, I highly recommend watching it online on YouTube (click on the title above). There are great talks and a lot of demonstrations of apps built with Meteor.

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

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