Welcome to issue #17 of TWiM!
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Updates in Meteor Core (MDG)
A Fistful of Slack Clones: Chat Apps with Meteor
This is a great blog post by Marc Holmes, VP of Marketing at MDG, about building chat applications in Meteor. He goes through various options out there in the community such as the various open source Slack alternatives and tutorials to build it from scratch.
Official React + Meteor Integrations
This repository on GitHub contains a set of packages, example apps, and tools to make it very easy for someone to use React with Meteor. It truly is a powerful combination especially considering the rendering performance of React and the fact that you can build native apps in JavaScript with React Native. That way, you can combine Meteor's data flow with React Native and build a full-stack JavaScript app that compiles to a native mobile app. There is a lot of work that has been done in this repository. There are things like ES6 / ES7 support, Meteor data flow integration into React as a mixin, proper React runtime requirements for dev and production, and examples to help you get started using these packages.
I am personally very happy to see this because there is a big debate over what kind of back end to use or which Flux library to use (out of the 15+ different ones). This allows people to choose Meteor as that back end rather than some iteration of Flux and reduce the complexity of their app.
So, if you are interested, read the getting started guide.
Proposal: Deprecate Session in favor of ReactiveDict
This is a very well written and very important hackpad by Sashko. I highly recommend that all Meteor developers read it as it helps point out problems with using Session for reactive variables in your Meteor apps.
Updates in the Meteor Community
The Story Behind Meteor's Next Big Move
A fantastic blog post by David Woody about the history of containers and why containerization is important for MDG's commercial application, Galaxy. I highly recommend reading it as it can give you a quick overview of the history behind containers and what problems it solves in developer operations.
Meteor Interviews #8: SQL and Meteor
This is an interview between Paul Dowman and Ben Green about SQL integration with Meteor. They have discussions on the various packages that Ben has released and the comparisons between his PostgreSQL package and the meteor-stream PostgreSQL package. They have some very interesting discussion on the problems behind SQL support and methods of implementation.
Meteor Casts Episode #1
This is a screen cast and tutorial on how to use the collection-hooks package on the client and server.
An Introduction to Meteor
This is a different kind of introduction to Meteor article. Typically, articles that give an intro to Meteor give a lot of code examples and sometimes compare them with other frameworks out there, but this one just goes through the seven core principles behind Meteor. Allen Eubank, the author of the article, explains each principle in detail and gives small code snippets for some of them.
How to Deploy your Meteor App on Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean (DO) is a very popular and inexpensive hosting solution. This tutorial shows you step-by-step on how to deploy your Meteor app properly onto a DO instance.
A Look at Meteor Collection Hooks
This is a blog post by Sacha Greif that talks about the collection-hooks package and the benefits of using it in your Meteor application. It can be used to setup a chain of events that should occur after the query is successfully executed and sanitizing the user input before sending the query. I highly recommend reading this blog post.
Meteor Security 201
Josh Owens wrote a blog post on Meteor Security 101 and so this is the next step in the process talking about more advanced topics in security for Meteor. Here's a small summary of the things he goes over as listed at the end of the post:
- Never trust a user inputted id
- Always find your data off the userId somehow (this.userId in pubs and Meteor.userId in methods)
- Decide on client side calls or method based data insertion / updates and use the appropriate checks
Kadira's 1st Anniversary and Beyond
It has been a year since Kadira has started and it has over 5500 apps using it, 500 million records per day being processed and they are now up to a team of 5 people! They also introduced a new feature called Kadira Debug. To quote directly from the post:
It’s an end-to-end debugging solution allowing you to see what’s happening on both the server side and the client side using the familiar Kadira interface.
I hope everyone who uses Kadira is just as excited as I am for this new feature!
React Native + Meteor DDP Client and MiniMongo Cache
This is a great app example on how to use React Native along with Meteor to leverage the best of both worlds.
Getting Started with Meteor Deployment
This is a free online book (and you can pay $3 for the PDF version) about deploying Meteor applications. It goes through various hosting providers and how to deploy to each of them. It goes through how to deploy using Compose, Modulus, Digital Ocean, and Galaxy (coming soon).
Why I won't Recommend Meteor Anymore
This is a very interesting article. It goes through various downfalls of Meteor and the comments made by core developers like Slava and other members of the community address each of those issues. Although the article is a negative look at Meteor, I recommend reading it and then read the comments that follow on Crater. Also, there are comments in the forum topic about this article.
Meteor Casts Episode #2
This screen cast and tutorial is about the collection-helpers package and how to use it properly in your Meteor application.
Meteor Podcast #63
Josh Owens and Dean Radcliff talk about what is going on in MeteorThey discuss:
- MDG Blogging
- Stateful URLs
- Meteor & Backbone
- No Meteor? What would you use?
- Meteor SQL
That's all for this week! Tune in next week for more updates in the Meteor universe.
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