JSFoo 2012

Meteor is a new platform that allows for building web apps just using Javascript alone. Our talk will walk the audience through a series of steps to build a real time chat application. During this walkthrough, we will gradually introduce concepts such as database connections, publish/subscribe model, hot code pushes and latency compensation in Meteor.

Outline

We will build an application from scratch during the course of the talk. And as we do that, we will show live demos of the app being built.

As we build the app, we will introduce the following concepts one after the other:

• The building blocks of Meteor - Node.js, Handlebars and the plug-in ecosystem
• Seamless injection of new and updated code to live apps - Users won’t miss a thing, nor do they get disturbed.
• One Language: Server, Client and I/O code using just Javascript - You are not working on different Languages anymore, just one language to rule them all.
• Automatic and real time browser side updates on data change.
• Latency compensation: How meteor creates an impression of a zero-latency connection to the database

To keep things efficient, we will have multiple incremental versions of the code already checked in to a local Git repo. We will check out and deploy new versions while introducing each new concept.

By the end of the talk, we will have a complete working chat application and would also (hopefully) have provided a good introduction to Meteor.

Speaker bio

Tamil has been building Javascript heavy production applications for the last 18 months. Most recently he’s been working on a large single page application using Backbone.js. Tamil was also a speaker at last year’s Droidcon - where he spoke on OpenGL on the Android platform.

Ernest Sankeshwar will accompany Tamil as a co-speaker for this talk. Ernest has been writing production grade web apps for almost 2 years now. His passions include Node.js, Backbone.js and Test Driven Javascript development.

Links

• http://meteor.com/