Getting started with Meteor.js

http://joshowens.me/getting-started-with-meteor-js/

by stared • 11 years ago

75 40 11 years ago

joshowens• 11 years ago

Thanks for sharing this with HN :)

stared3• 11 years ago

My pleasure. I like this meta-introducation approach - i.e. when there is abundance of introductions its worth make an introduction to introductions.

As a side note, one of things that made me using Meteor.js is the easiness of starting (largely to great official examples and tutorials).

BTW: I highly recommend Discover Meteor by Sacha Greif & Tom Coleman (https://www.discovermeteor.com/). One of the best tutorial books I went through.

puranjay• 11 years ago

Question as an aspiring web developer with a moderate-high degree of comfort in Javascript, and low-moderate comfort in Ruby: would you recommend giving 100% to mastering Rails, or dabbling with Meteor from time to time?

The aim is to not get a job as a developer, but build my own projects.

Apologies if this kind of question is better suited for Stackoverflow

stared3• 11 years ago

@joshowens, one more comment - the compilation is excellent, but for packages I think that (especially for a newcomer) it would be better to add a one sentence desc per package (especially as one do not need to start with learning all of them!) rather than providing 3 links (if one wish, one can easily jump from Atmosphere to GitHub).

evo_95• 11 years ago

Meteor is by far my favorite new platform for side projects. I love how easy it is to get something up and running, the integrated build system and the simplicity of deploying your projects to a meteor host.

I wish there was an easy way to use a different database although I get it, it's part of what makes Meteor so easy get something up and running quickly.

My gut is that if Meteor weren't solely tied to MongoDB and instead had an easy way to switch to Firebase, Parse, etc this platform would really take off.

primigenus• 11 years ago

You aren't tied to MongoDB.

You can switch to Firebase (https://atmospherejs.com/mrt/firebase) or Parse or even REST APIs if you want. Someone is even writing a reactive MySQL driver (https://github.com/numtel/meteor-mysql).

uptownJimmy2• 11 years ago

1. The fact that one must hack together Meteor with anyting other than MongoDB effectively makes it "tied to MongoDB". Most people who want to engage in this level of hackery in their spare time would, I think, just ignore Meteor and dive straight into some version of the MEAN stack.

2. Because that's the whole point of Meteor: that it doesn't require the same level of server-side savviness and hackery that server-side JavaScript usually requires. Meteor is trying to be something like Rails, where the barriers to entry are not quite so prohibitive for quite so many aspiring developers.

3. Meteor must have official support for one (or more) of the SQL db's in order to take off. That's not all it needs, but it's a big one. I'm interested in seeing how SQL support is implemented, and I assume we're talking some sort of ORM, but we'll see.

wfleming• 11 years ago

Ditto: so much about Meteor just makes the day-to-day work of building something a real pleasure compared to other tools.

For me, the thing really holding it back from more serious work is that I've had real problems getting testing to work well: Velocity[1] has had a bunch of problems for me.

I hope things like the focus on MongoDB and the lack of good automated testing tools are just because Meteor is still fairly immature. It could be a really good tool for a lot of use-cases.

[1] http://velocity.meteor.com

kbd• 11 years ago

The lack of a testing story for Meteor was what really stalled my side project with it. Since then, Velocity has become the official testing framework but I haven't gotten the chance to dig into it. I'm disappointed to hear you've had a bunch of problems with it, as I was hoping all my testing problems would be solved next time I returned to Meteor.

tlianza• 11 years ago

One thing I was surprised to run into is how basic CRUD operations don't have an out-of-the-box solution, like they did even with Rails many years ago.

When I read the "Discover Meteor" guide and they got to the part about handling submit buttons by writing jQuery handlers with e.preventDefault and all that, I was really surprised. Similarly I didn't see obvious, baked-in solutions to validation, or sharing templates between "edit" and "create" situations.

Then, there's the built-in Meteor accounts stuff, which does not make it easy to create an admin page for users, which again I expected to be a straightfoward task. And, not only that, but once you do start to build that you read more-and-more about how allowing the client to make certain modifications is insecure, and so you should start pushing things back to Meteor methods...

Anyway, a lot of this stuff has given me pause. I love the runtime speed, but the speed of getting something up and running (in terms of dev time) seems considerably slower than the equivalent in Rails, particularly around basic CRUD operations that you just need to get out of the way before you can build the more interesting stuff.

dadair2• 11 years ago

While not baked into the framework itself, I've found a few repositories that aim to make CRUD a bit easier: https://github.com/aldeed/meteor-autoform/ https://github.com/aldeed/meteor-simple-schema/

dadair2• 11 years ago

I've been using Meteor for sideprojects to learn Javascript. While I like the ecosystem and meteor itself, I have found it hard (as someone new to Javascript itself) to learn "best practices" while using Meteor. I've tried several times to use different testing frameworks, but I end up getting frustrated with not knowing what I need to mock, how I should package things, etc.

amirouche• 11 years ago

meteor as a lot of "specifics" that what I don't like about it.

jxm2624• 11 years ago

Thanks for this. I'm brand new to Meteor and have been looking for resources.

Does anyone have an idea of when the official Windows installation will be released? I've been struggling with trying to get this working correctly on my windows pc and signed up for their email list when it comes out. Hopefully soon?

pmalynin2• 11 years ago

For any kind of serverside development I recommend you get a Linux VM. I too prefer to develop on windows but one must understand that in this day and age no one will take you seriously of you host on Windows.

grigio• 11 years ago

You can also try meteor inside Docker https://github.com/grigio/docker-meteor

pc86• 11 years ago

one must understand that in this day and age no one will take you seriously of you host on Windows.

Must I? We clearly don't talk to the same people, then. Not only have I never judged someone or something based on what web host they use (seriously?), I've never heard anyone say or intimate that they would, either.

owlee• 11 years ago

orly?

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...

evo_95• 11 years ago

I found this, hope it helps: http://win.meteor.com

jxm2624• 11 years ago

thank you! For the moment I was using https://www.nitrous.io/ but this looks like it could be a solution to develop locally

rory• 11 years ago

I don't have a date, but I believe it is the next major item on the core development group's checklist. https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap

emgee3• 11 years ago

This is actively being worked on by core developers. See https://github.com/meteor/meteor/wiki/Preview-of-Meteor-on-W... if you want to try the pre-release.

jxm2624• 11 years ago

How did i miss this? Thanks so much!

jfaucett• 11 years ago

On first glance I thought this was a joke:

"Required

Javascript - JS first?! Yes soldier, don't question me again or I will karate chop you!

Shell (Terminal)

HTML & CSS

JSON

MongoDB

Handlebars

Git & GitHub

jQuery

LESS and/or SASS

Underscore and/or Lo-Dash

Bootstrap

NodeJS

Cordova

ElasticSearch

Ionic - Meteor Package Meteoric "

Then immediately following, "Now that you know the above you are deemed worthy to tap into the power and awesomeness of Meteor!"

Meteor's probably a good framework (I wouldn't know one way or the other since I haven't tried it), but from that summary it doesn't seem like an easy sell to someone looking for a framework to use.

evo_95• 11 years ago

The author was trying to point out how many different pieces you'd have to hack together to get to the equivalent of what Meteor gives you out of the box.

So no, you don't need to install all that other stuff to use Meteor if that's what you took the author to mean.

bigpeopleareold• 11 years ago

GitHub as a requirement? So, I can't write a Meteor app without GitHub? :(

dfischer• 11 years ago

Meteor is cool but component based architecture is even better and Meteor doesn't really lend it's hand to that. It's a lot of dom action binding/coupling.

Getting started with Meteor.js

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