david glasser in chicago - meteor: past, present, & future

My Year of MeteorMeteor: Past, Present, and Future

David Glasser (@glasser)

Wednesday, October 23, 13

My Year of Meteor

• April 2012: Meteor launches publicly• September 2012: I joined Meteor

Development Group• September 2013: I give this talk• ???: Meteor 1.0 is released


Meteor, April 2012: the application platform for the rich client era• Data on the wire• One language• Database everywhere• Latency compensation• Full stack reactivity


Meteor Past

• Demo time!


Meteor PresentWhat we’ve done in one year


Sending email: September 2012

• My first project!• A simple server-side Email.send API• Implemented in my first week at Meteor

Development Group• Zero configuration needed for “meteor

deploy”


Meteor Accounts: October 2012

• Full-featured auth system• Fine-grained user-based controls over

database reads and writes• Federated OAuth login (built-in support

for Facebook, Google, Twitter, GitHub, Weibo)

• Secure password login• Email validation and password recovery• Optional UI widgets implementing login,

signup, password change, etc


Cursor deduplication: November 2012

• Problem: many users subscribe to the same database query, but the live database publisher could not cache

• Caching live updating data streams is harder than caching static data

• Node’s concurrency model does not lend itself well to this

• Built new concurrency primitives in order to create a live DB query cache


New DDP wire protocol: February 2013• We redesigned our wire protocol based

on a year of experience• Supporting more data types (Date,

Mongo ObjectID, binary, etc)• Actually wrote a spec• The messages in the protocol better

match the “observeChanges” primitive for watching a database query

• (Also: Improve the logic behind observeChanges to poll less often)


appcache: March 2013

• Want your app to use the HTML5 AppCache API to load faster? Just type “meteor add appcache”

• First major feature built entirely by an open source community member


Engine, a new distribution system: April 2013• Install multiple releases of Meteor on

your developer machine at once• Pin each app to a specific release• Put your own packages inside your app• Use Node packages from npm


Package linker: August 2013

• Meteor is a collection of packages plus a build tool

• The “linker” release rethought exactly what a package is and how they depend on each other

• Packages now have real namespaces• Source maps (including for CoffeeScript)• standard-app-packages• Weak dependencies


Devshop: January 2013 – tonight

• We host a monthly devshop at our office in SF

• 2pm-late• Invited talks• Lightning talks• Meet other Meteor users and the core

team


Meteor FutureThe road to 1.0


Bug Week!

• Meteor is an ambitious project• We’re in “preview” mode• Most of our work goes into brand new

packages or rewrites• Over 80 external contributors• We pay attention to our GitHub issues,

but we don’t drop everything to fix them• Except this week


Meteor UI: A new rendering engine

• In reactive templates, you just write {{name}} and if the name changes, it magically updates

• No “when the name changes, find every reference and update it” needed

• Current Meteor templates rerender the entire template and use a clever “patch” algorithm to update the screen

• Doesn’t work well with jQuery• So David Greenspan rewrote it


Galaxy: the next generation of “meteor deploy”• Running your app should be as smooth

as developing it• “meteor deploy” has no SLA• Galaxy is an advanced version of the

“meteor deploy” server that you can easily run on your own infrastructure

• Auto-scaling, auto-updating• We’ve been running our own sites on it

since July• Enterprisey features will cost money

(aka: yes, we have a business plan)Wednesday, October 23, 13

Oplog tailing: scaling with MongoDB

• The core data read operation in Meteor is “publish the results of a query and tell us when it changes”

• MongoDB doesn’t actually have this operation

• We fake it with polling and heuristics• Instead, watch the “oplog” for changes• A community user has a prototype

implementation that performs well but doesn’t implement the full API

• I’ve done a rough draft of a core versionWednesday, October 23, 13

Atmosphere in core: Third Party Packages• Meteor is a build tool plus a set of

packages• You can write your own packages in your

app• No supported way to share packages• Atmosphere/Meteorite: community

package repository (582 packages!)• Needs a better versioning story• Concept: Ubuntu-style packaging


Next stop: 1.0

• Meteor 1.0 will be a release we can feel comfortable supporting for a while

• We’d love to get there as soon as we can• We’re hiring :)


Thank you!

• Any questions?


david glasser in chicago - meteor: past, present, & future

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