Welcome to issue #19 of TWiM!

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Updates in Meteor Core (MDG)

New beforeSend option on HTTP.call

There is a new option that allows you to access the xmlHttpRequest object before sending that way, if something is not the way it should be, you can abort the call. I think this is a useful feature and can add some more stability to your application.

DDP Rate Limiting

There is a branch created by Anubhav Jain, which from the looks of it, allows you to set rules and rate limit calls to your DDP api. It is an interesting thing to think about, the same way that various companies like Twitter rate limit their API calls to grab tweets via HTTP, you can do the same with a DDP rate limiter. So, in the future, if you expose a DDP API for other developers to use, you can make sure that people are not abusing it by rate limiting it. So, this is definitely something to look out for.

Updates in the Meteor Community

Browser Push Notifications

This is an awesome new package that allows you to send browser-based (specifically Chrome) to your Android device. I find this package to be useful because you can use it for you web app while you are building your mobile app. That way, the user can have a similar feel to a mobile app with push notifications in the browser.

A Very Short Introduction to ReactiveDict

I highly recommend that people go through and read this very short introduction to the ReactiveDict package. It is a very useful package and can help you scope your variable appropriately rather than using the infamous Session everywhere. It allows you to organize your code more with name spacing.

Allow and Deny Challenge

This is a great blog post by Pete Corey that goes through his thought process on his submission for the allow and deny challenge that Sacha Greif started. This is not something that can be easily summarized, but I highly recommend reading the entire blog post. It can show you very good security patterns for your Meteor apps.

Introducing Kadira Debug

The MeteorHacks team has released Kadira Debug! This is a great tool to use to debug your application. It allows you to debug the performance of your client side calls and even Blaze calls. With Kadira Debug, it should be much easier to optimize your front end and make your Meteor app faster.

Reining in the Reactivity with Meteor

This is a great blog post that shows you how you can pick and choose what parts of your Blaze front end can be reactive. This specific use case is when you have a list of items with a specified ranking. On load, you want them to be sorted by rank, but if their rank changes, you don't want them to reorder right away. This is to avoid a UX issue with items on the page disappearing instantly. But, you do want the rank of the item to be reflected.

Toy Story: How Max Savin Created Meteor Toys

This is a guest blog post on the Discover Meteor blog about Max Savin and how he created Meteor Toys. Meteor Toys is a suite of development packages that can help you speed up testing certain parts of your Meteor app. He goes through and also tells the thought process of why he went towards a paid packages system. It is interesting and I do agree with it. If there are developers out there willing to support very high quality packages that can give some intricate features that people would pay for, why not make it a paid package?

Meteor Casts Episode #4

This is a Meteor Cast that talks about utilizing NightWatch to build tests for your Meteor application.

Meteor Blaze Template Caching

This is a awesome demonstration by Arunoda that shows you how he increased the speed of loading Blaze templates. He did this by caching the templates and maybe there will be a package coming out soon for this (at least I hope there will be).

Meteor Club Q&A with Matt Debergalis

This is one of the best Q&As that I have seen in the Meteor community so far. I can't summarize all of the things that were talked about in this Q&A, so you should just go ahead and watch it. I highly recommend it.

Simple Template Replacement in Telescope

This is a nifty new feature added to the Telescope project. It allows you to take a template like post_title and replace it with another template by simply naming the other template with the custom_ prefix. So, if you have post_title, you're new template will be named custom_post_title and it will automatically replace the old one. If you want a different prefix besides custom_ you can set that up. But, it is custom_ by default.

Fat Models and Skinny Templates

This is a great blog post by Josh Owens on putting your logic into models that way your template logic does not have as much to it. I see this pattern making sense for most applications.

Allow & Deny - A Security Primer

I highly recommend that all Meteor developers read this. It goes into detail on patterns with using Allow and Deny on your collections and good ways to keep your data secure.

Real World ES6 Examples in Meteor

This blog post goes into detail with code examples on how to use ES6 in your Meteor application. It gives a lot of very good examples. For those of you interested in ES6 (like me), this is a really good resource to know how to get started on using it in your Meteor app.

Meteor's LibScore is up 28% in the Last Month

This is a really great thing to see. Meteor is growing in popularity and the list of sites using Meteor shows you that there are bigger apps out there that are utilizing Meteor. I would keep this resource so that you can refer other people to it to prove that there are large Meteor apps out there with a low Alexa score (lower is better).

Homegrown Everything

This is a very interesting discussion on the forums about building custom libraries vs adopting libraries that are out there. The discussion starts with the classic Blaze vs React debate. If you have something constructive to say on the matter, please post in the topic. I would like to see where this discussion goes.

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

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