Meteor is like sweet and sour chicken. At first glance, it’s this superb tool that has limitless potential for web applications and is quite easy to organize, if you’re a neat freak like myself. However, after tinkering around for a bit, one might find themselves having to muster up quite a bit of patience, as meteor has a tendency to take eons to load. Aside from the initial “What in the world am I doing?” phase, I’ve had a great time learning little tricks and secrets about making webpages coherent with current standards.
Starting off learning a new programming language tends to be the same, regardless of what you’re learning. As such, building my first “Hello World” webpage, with meteor, was rather simple. Install a few files here, change a few lines of code there and voila! Within a few minutes or so, you have your very own webpage saying “Hello World!” After graduating from an elementary level, I was intoduced into the “big kids” club of meteor. It began with implementing a template into my very own mockup of a contacts list. Instead of dealing with only client-sided files, I had to broaden my horizon to the server-side of web applications. I needed to ensure that each new file I added/deleted was updated within the router file, I edited the homepage to keep users from accessing files which no longer existed and stored user information into the mongo database. I then pushed forward to giving the option of updating existing contacts, by accessing the id of the person within the corresponding Contacts collection. I concluded this project with the addition of a remove button. After a few days of hair-pulling, I managed to create a contacts list I can regularly use!
Don’t get me wrong, these tasks weren’t easy for me to understand (event handlers and helper functions are still somewhat of a gray area for me), but I do understand the overall idea behind creating a web application. I look forward to working with this program in the future and adding it to my repertoire of software engineering tools.