Chapter 1. A better way to build apps
This chapter covers
- The story behind Meteor
- The Meteor stack
- Full-stack JavaScript, reactivity, and distributed platforms
- Core components of the Meteor platform
- The pros and cons of using Meteor
- The anatomy of Meteor applications
Meteors have a reputation of changing life as we know it. They’re capable of making dinosaurs extinct or forcing Bruce Willis to sacrifice his life for humankind. This book is about a Meteor that impacts web development, but it doesn’t threaten to destroy anything. On the contrary, it promises to offer a better way to build applications. Meteor takes several existing tools and libraries; combines them with new thoughts and new libraries, standards, and services; and bundles them to provide an entire ecosystem for developing web and mobile applications that are a delight to use.
Meteor is an open source, MEAN[1] stack–based app development platform designed to have a consistent JavaScript API across client and server with a focus on real-time, reactive applications, rapid prototyping, and code reuse.
1The MEAN stack refers to all applications built on top of MongoDB, Node.js, Angular, and Express.js. There are several variations of the MEAN stack, such as MEEN—MongoDB, Ember.js, Express, and Node.js. Sometimes the term is used loosely to indicate any infrastructure running on Node.js in combination with a NoSQL database.