Building Realtime Applications with Meteor

with Tom Coleman & Daryl Antony

Tom

@tmeasday - http://tom.thesnail.org
http://themeteorbook.com
Percolate Studio

Daryl

Common Code - http://commoncode.com.au

Python/Django/JS in Melbourne

@darylantony @commoncode

Code Shop

114 Hoddle Street
Abbotsford, Melbourne

Free coffee to any Code Shop visitors from CampJS :)

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Overview of Meteor

• http://meteor.com/
• 001 Pure JavaScript. Write your entire app in pure JavaScript. All the same APIs are available on the client and the server — including database APIs! — so the same code can easily run in either environment.
• 002 Live page updates. Just write your templates. They automatically update when data in the database changes. No more boilerplate redraw code to write. Supports any templating language.
• 003 Clean, powerful data synchronization. Write your client code as if it were running on the server and had direct access to the database. No more loading your data from REST endpoints.
• See http://docs.meteor.com/

Mello from the ground up

A Realtime Trello like app in Meteor

Overview

Building an application with Meteor – "Mello from the ground up"

• Meteor Development patterns
• Packages
• Collections
• Templates
  • helpers
  • events
• Session
• Accounts
• Timers
• Methods
• Subscriptions
  • Publish & Subscribe
• Security

Watch while we develop

• Everybody open their laptop browsers to: http://simba.local:3000/

To run meteor and see the code

$ curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh
$ git clone git@github.com:commoncode/mello.git
$ cd mello
$ meteor
Running on: http://localhost:3000/

Install Meteor

• Installed Meteor
• Added packages
  • stylus
  • bootstrap

Create HTML

• app boilerplate HTML
• add stylus
• add styles

Template Helpers

• Create our first Helpers
  • static Lists & Tasks

Meteor Collections

• Create Collections
  • add data
  • ask about the 'lib' directory
  • Meteor collections correspond to Mongo collections
  • Comment/ask about Meteor collections
    • Isn't this insecure? (subset)
• Wire Collections to Helpers
• Client Console & Collections
  • show reactivity

Template Events

• Capture event to manipulate data
  • move Task between Lists

Meteor Session

• Using sessions to show state for the current user only
• Edit mode for Tasks
  • add, delete, modify
  • title, description
• Hot code reload vs. Browser reload
  • Browser reload?
  • The right way to code in Meteor?
    • Any 'state' not tied to the url should be stored in the Session?
      • Because hot code reloads can happen at anytime
      • Server-side rendering?

Accounts UI

• Lets sign in
  • invite audience to sign in
• Online Presence
  • Meteor.method
    • define methods that run on the server, called by the client
  • Meteor.call
  • Meteor.setInterval
  • Meteor.user()
    • user.profile?
  • Meteor.userId()
  • Meteor.users
• Assign responsibility for tasks
  • All tasks, My tasks

What we haven't covered?

• insecure
• subscriptions
• latency compensation
  • deny