Meteor Day

Introduction To Meteor

Outline

• What Meteor actually is
• Live code an example app
• Example apps

What Is Meteor?

Open-source platform for building web- and mobile-apps in javascript.

Built to power the next generation of apps.

• Rich user interfaces
• Collaborative multi-user applications
• Cross platform apps
• Fast development

Meteor runs on Node.js

data from July 2014

How Modern Apps Look And Feel

• Focus on your app's unique features instead of wrangling network code
• Meteor's Goal: Facebook-quality apps without Facebook's money.

Old tools don't work for modern apps

• Modern apps serve data, not HTML
• Modern apps cannot have a refresh button.

As a result, we have to switch away from old architecture.

Rails, Django, PHP, Asp.NET, etc: built around the old architecture, difficult to adapt to the new model

Meteor's Cloud/Client Platform

• Meteor gives you all of the components you need to make modern apps work - it's a complete platform, not just a library to solve a problem

• Let's go right into the demo to see how it feels to use and then we'll explain how the pieces fit together.

Components

• Livequery - watch DB queries
• DDP - send data back and forth to the client
• Minimongo - store data and do DB queries on the client
• Tracker - the thing that enables reactive updates
• Blaze - rendering the view based on Tracker updates

Read about all of this on the Projects page - meteor.com/projects

Example Apps

• Meteor ships with several example apps
• Todos, a full-featured todo list app
  • --meteor create --example todos
• Local Market, a mobile social engagement app
  • --meteor create --example localmarket

• What you can build after learning a little more about Meteor

Workpop - Built on Meteor

• Raised 7.9 million Series A led by Trinity Ventures
• Trinity Ventures funding announcement: "most rapid prototyping, iteration, and development we've ever seen from an early stage company."

Businesses built on Meteor

Growing Rapidly

• Over 150 meetup groups around the world - meteor.meetup.com
• Over 2000 community-authored packages - atmospherejs.com
• Discover Meteor has made over $300,000 in book sales (as of Sep 2014)
• #11 on Github (just passed Backbone, will soon pass Rails)

Learning Resources

• Official Meteor tutorial at meteor.com/install
• Discover Meteor (get first 8 chapters for free!) book.discovermeteor.com/starter
• Stack Overflow, tagged Meteor
• Docs - docs.meteor.com

Now it's your turn!

Let's install Meteor