In With The New
19 Oct 2016
Over the past two weeks I’ve been forced to work with Meteor, an open source platform to develop web, mobile, or desktop applications, that utilizes MongoDB. It’s a different take on the client-server schema I’m used to with SQL/MySQL. Playing around with the Meteor platform I was able to create a very intelligent database backed application in a short amount of time. It was ridiculously easy, well, mostly due to all the tutorial videos that held my hand as I went step-by-step creating the application.
There is definitely an initial learning curve with Meteor. What did you find difficult? What did you find easy? What did you find cool and interesting?
Overall Meteor felt just like any other language, difficulty wise. There are always things you don’t know and need to pull documents for. I don’t believe any programmer has gone into a new language and instantly new everything about it. It takes time and it takes a lot of ‘getting your hands dirty’ with it to really understand how to utilize a new language or framework. The most difficult aspect of learning Meteor, for me at least, is the sheer amount of things being thrown at me. For example, I know how to use PHP or Javascript to pull queries from a SQL database and when I had to do the same in Meteor/MongoDB it is completely different. There were no queries. I was able to do the equivalent in Meteor because I had the tutorial videos to follow but I don’t fully comprehend how it is working. And then I get blasted with creating functions and importing them into different sections of my application. But I know it’s all on me how difficult learning Meteor can be. I just have to sit down and code and code and code and eventually I’ll have a better grasp on the platform.
At the same time everything about Meteor was easy. There are variables, conditional statements and many more of the functionalities of other languages. So if you are a pretty seasoned programmer all those will come naturally easy. It’s the syntax that you just have to learn to tweak, which isn’t all that hard as well. There are going to be a ton of things you veteran hackers will already know. The great thing about it though, is how much work Meteor does for you. I know that’s how all frameworks are. They want you to use them to make your coding lives easier. But that’s exactly what Meteor does and it does it well.
Meteor is an example of a modern, internet-based, client-server application architecture. What are your first impressions of Meteor as an application architecture?
I came in thinking it would be similar to a SQL/MYSQL back-end application but was surprised to see a completely revamped implementation of sending queries and retrieving data from a server. I’m still not convinced I am 100% behind Meteor only because I have more knowledge and experience regarding the older methods of back-end applications. So, I guess I’m being bias but I won’t stop using the platform, at least until the end of this project. Maybe I’ll change my mind by that time.