Preface
Thank you for buying this book. You made a great choice for a new step in frontend and JavaScript technology. The Meteor framework is not just another library that aims to make things easier. It is a complete solution for a web server, client logic, and templates. Additionally, it contains a complete build process, which will make working for the Web by chunks faster. Thanks to Meteor, linking your scripts and styles is a thing of the past, as the automatic build process takes care of everything for you. Surely, this is a big change, but you will soon love it, as it makes extending your app as fast as creating a new file.
Meteor aims to create single-page applications where real time is the default. It takes care of the data synchronization and updating of the DOM. If data changes, your screen will be updated. These two basic concepts make up a lot of the work we do as web developers, and with Meteor this happens without any extra line of code.
In my opinion, Meteor is a complete game changer in modern web development. It introduces the following patterns as defaults:
- Fat clients: All of the logic resides on the client. HTML is only sent on the initial page load
- JavaScript and the same API are used on both the client and the server
- Real time: Data synchronizes automatically to all clients
- A "database everywhere" approach, allowing database queries on the client side
- Publish/subscribe patterns for web server communication as the default
Once you have used all these new concepts, it is hard to go back to the old way of doing things where so much time goes only into preparing the app's structure while linking files or wrapping them into Require.js modules, writing endpoints, and writing code to request and send data back and forth.
While reading this book, you will be introduced step by step to these concepts and how they connect together. We will build a blog, with the backend to edit posts. A blog is a good example, as it uses listings of posts, different routes for each post, and an admin interface to add new posts, providing all we need to fully understand Meteor.
