Welcome to issue #6 of TWiM!

If you would like updates like this emailed to you, subscribe at thisweekinmeteor.com

Updates in Meteor Core (MDG)

Meteor 1.0.4 Released

The update we have been waiting for! This update has a ton of changes... here is a small list of important need-to-know updates:

Mongo driver updated and supports Mongo 2.6 and 3.0
Oplog optimizations for larger queues
onError callback for Meteor.subscribe has been replaced with onStop with an optional first argument of error
Template level subscriptions! You can now use this.subscribe in your templates
Improved rendering performance for larger arrays in Blaze
Login hooks, onLogin and onLoginFailure added to Accounts
Cordova updated to 4.2.0 along with various plugins
You can use an object in Session.set({var1 : x, var2: y}). It is equivalent to Session.set('var1', x); and Session.set('var2', y);

Meteor 1.0.4.1 Released

A patch was released that fixes meteor publish-for-arch for packages with colons in their names.

Data flow from the database to the UI: Three layers of Meteor

This is a great article by Sashko Stubailo, a core developer at Meteor, about the way data flows in a Meteor application. I highly recommend reading this as it can give you more insight on how Meteor works or if you are a beginner, it can give you a jumpstart on understanding the platform.

Help test the preview release with new Blaze features

There are some new Blaze features coming soon and they need to be tested. In this preview release, it contains the {% raw %}{{#each x in y}}{% endraw %} syntax, {% raw %}{{#let x=some.other.var}}{% endraw %} and @index exposed in each.So, for those of you interested in testing this out, run meteor --release EACH-IN@0.0.3 update and report your findings here

First feature complete release candidate for Meteor on Windows

This is HUGE! MDG has been working very hard on Windows support and it is now feature complete. That means it is time for more people to come in on testing it out and giving feedback and once those bugs are ironed out... we'll see it released in Meteor 1.1 ;-)

A core Babel package is under development

This is exciting. It turns out that MDG is working on supporting ES6 with the Babel transpiler in an official package. For those of you more interested, read the commit notes and check out the branch itself.

Updates in the Meteor Community

Cincinnati March Meetup - React & More!

Gerard Sychay from Differential does a great talk on integrating React with Meteor and various methods of doing so. He explored various packages for react integration and has some great insights. This was the first recorded meetup in Cincinnati, so the video has some bugs in it.

Mongol - A handy development package

This is an awesome new package developed by Max Savin. It is a package meant to be used in development to allow you to easily view Mongo and template data. You can see a demo of it here

Can Meteor be a leader in developer happiness?

This is an interesting question asked on the Meteor forums and I highly recommend reading this and various responses in the thread especially the one given by Sashko.

Meteor Support in Sublime Text

This is a package developed by Slava Kim, a core developer, that adds autocompletion through the ternjs library. It

Build a Yik Yak Clone in Meteor

This is a great experiment and tutorial on building a Yik Yak clone in Meteor. He goes through how to do it from start to finish with intermediate steps explaining problems that came about and the code and packages needed to fix those problems. It's a really great read.

This Week in Telescope #1

This title sounds a bit familiar... Anyway, this is a weekly update by Sacha Greif on everything that's going on with Telescope and the community behind that product specifically.

Lookback - A large Meteor app rebrands

Lookback is one of the biggest Meteor apps in production right now and has rebranded and redesigned their website. They have also released a bunch of awesome packages that can help other Meteor developers out.

Meteor running on Android wear

This is an awesome PoC (Proof of Concept) of a Meteor app running on the Moto 360 watch. The developer stated that since it is running on Chromium, it is a very big resource hog and will drain battery quickly.

Mashup of Differential's Boilerplate & AdminLTE 2

This is an awesome template that uses the Differential boilerplate and combines it with the free and open source Admin LTE template. You can use this theme to start building a nice admin site for your company!

How to make Meteor web apps communicate together

This is a great article by Adrien Griveau about how Meteor applications communicate with eachother and how it differs from the class HTTP GET / POST way of communication. It gives a lot of insight on how Meteor and more specifically DDP can really change the way you think about developing applications.

Flow Router and Subscription Management

This is an article by the MeteorHacks team about their new package, Flow Router, and how the new template level subscriptions can affect the way you develop your Meteor applications. It gives insight on where it would be appropriate to use template level subscriptions vs router level subscriptions and small use cases for both.

Add a DDP server to your NodeJS HTTP App

This npm package created by Q42 allows you to easily expose your data through DDP and it doesn't interfere with your HTTP server already running. So, you can add a DDP-based API to your Node application! I love this because it allows nodejs apps to become more Meteor friendly and it also helps spread DDP.

Deploying Meteor Apps

This is a post on the Meteor forums with some great discussion on deploying Meteor applications. It shows various services and combinations that people use and other insights.

Is meteor.js mature to enough to use it for building big applications?

This is an Ask HN query on HackerNews and there is some interesting discuss both against and for Meteor.

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