Preface

Stop and think for just a minute about the last time you were delighted.

I'd bet good money that whatever that delightful experience was, it had nothing to do with a new JavaScript framework. Well, that is about to change.

Meteor is not just another JavaScript framework that you'll forget the name of a few weeks from now. It was created—and is continuously improved upon—by legit computer scientists driven by a vision of how software development should be. Their mantra is that "programming should be fun" and as you go through this list of Meteor recipes, you will see exactly how much fun it really is to develop applications using Meteor.

Meteor is modular and declarative, supports data-on-the-wire, is well supported by a thriving development community, and implements full-stack reactivity. This sounds like a bunch of meaningless buzzwords, until you fully grasp their impact on your day-to-day development efforts.

Because Meteor is modular and well supported, it works easily with all of your favorite JavaScript frameworks. You can use the entire Meteor stack, or you can mix and match it with community packages to complement your existing infrastructure / skill set.

Meteor supports data-on-the-wire through the Distributed Data Protocol (DDP). This innovation is significant in that it allows you to create elegant, powerful client applications responsible for their own rendering. You no longer have to rely on complex, outdated server technology rife with state and rendering problems that (frankly) should have been solved years ago. DDP is not unique to Meteor or even to JavaScript. DDP clients are available in nearly every major programming language! This opens up many elegant, powerful integration possibilities, allowing you to build upon existing platforms and infrastructures.

Combining DDP with full-stack reactivity opens up an entirely new way of developing frontend applications. Templates, database transactions, and view/controller logic are vastly simplified, allowing you to write clean, concise, declarative code. Your frontend development efforts will go from weeks to hours as you stop worrying about tedious state and CRUD operations and focus on rapid, elegant prototyping.

The more acquainted you become with Meteor, the more effective and prolific you will become as a developer. Programming with the Meteor framework is truly an enjoyable experience. The recipes found in this book will get you well on your way to being delighted by each project you complete and will serve as an indispensable reference for many projects to come.