Get 50% off my Meteor book until the end of February!
You can get now 50% off of my book Building Single-page Web Apps with Meteor, until February 29th 2016. Just use the code BSWAM50 when checking out!
Meteor
Meteor Blaze Templates done right!
I often hear amazing and simple people find Meteors Blaze render engine, but in the same sentence mention how its difficult to manage large templates or create re-useable components. In my last two+ years working with Meteor I came across the same hurdles, but also found great solutions. So I thought its time to share my best practices in a blog post. Though this post is for advanced user, I want to give new comers a short intro into Meteors. If you’re looking for something specific you can jump right there: Using template-var Passing data around Accessing template vars from inside callbacks Reacting on data context changes Passing data in …
Ethereum Meetup Workshop #1
The following is a video about my Ethereum Meetup Workshop on building a simple #Dapp in #Meteor. Sadly the audio broke, so i re-recorded it with only screensharing and no guests 😐 (Original can be found here) You can find the code of the dapp here.
Meteor Build Client
Since more to than 2 years I’ve build Meteor applications. Interestingly I’ve build most of them only using the client part. Working with TunedIn we used a LAMPP stack API, and in my current work I use Meteor to build Ðapps, which don’t have a server in the traditional sense, instead they only talk to the blockchain and get delivered over swarm, a decentralised filesystem. I wrote a while back about using Meteor as frontend library and wrote a little grunt script, which did this. My blog post got more than 3000 hits in just two days, so there seems to be a great interest in that use case. A …
Template-Var update
I am very busy improving the ethereum platform API and therefore i’m not writing to much updates here. One improvement i did to a package of mine today i want to share, though. Template-Var the package, which allows you to set template specific reactive variables has now two new methods: TemplateVar.getFrom(selector, propertyName) – which allows you to get receive vars from other templates by simply passing a selector of one of its elements. TemplateVat.setTo(selector, propertyName, value) – which does the same for setting reactive vars to other templates. Inside this other templates instances you can still use TemplateVar.set()/.get to alter the reactive variables as well. Hope you like and use …
Meteor-platform packages and loading screens
Most people are confused about Meteor and what it consists of, its like a black box with confusing packages and dependencies. To bring a little light in this I will drop here a list of all the packages, which make up the meteor-platform package. If you remove it from you app, you have a plain app, without any meteor in it:
Meteor Cheat Sheet
I just found this nice cheat sheet for Meteor, which i updated an repost here:
On Angular.js
Probably everyone who want to built modern web applications stood once before the choice of the framework, so did i a 2 years back. At the time angular.js became popular and i stood before the decision to either use backbone, ember.js or angular. What i didn’t like about angular was its very specific HTML attribute syntax. I wanted to write clean HTML not some custom attribute mess. Luckily i stumbled over Meteor! At the time Meteor was not quite ready yet and single page apps were not the standard, so it was quite a risk. I went that road and build a Meteor app, which only used its frontend part …
Meteor Book and updated packages
Its a while since wrote something here, so i will post an update of whats going on in the background. My book Over the last 9 months or so i wrote a book called “Building Single page Web Apps with Meteor” and i’m finally almost done. I’m currently writing on the last chapter titled “Testing in Meteor”, which drags a little as velocity – meteors official testing framework is quite not ready just yet. The book writing experience was long, though it was a very fluid process until the last few months were i basically ran behind every change in the API to keep all chapters updated 🙂 But i …
Meteor template animation helper
UPDATE 04.06.2015 Better use the new template animation helper, which uses ui_hooks to start animations: https://atmospherejs.com/frozeman/animation-helper UPDATE 23.10.2013 You can now also pass a template name to the {{AnimateTemplate “…”}} helper, this will render the template in place, switching a hidden class to animate on the element(s) with the class animate. Additionally the data context of this template gets the _templateAnimationKey, so you can manually fade the template out. To do that call the following inside a helper or event of that template: Update made BLAZE ready, the new render engine of meteor View/Session.set(this._templateAnimationKey, false); If you’re inpatient check out atmosphere. I love meteor for its simplicity, but there is …
Using Meteor as frontend library!
UPDATE You can now use my CLI to get the client part of your Meteor app! If you’re impatient go here: https://github.com/frozeman/MeteorFrontend Meteor is awesome, i loved it immediately as i saw the video. The way you can build one page apps is absolutely intuitive. I struggled with Ember.js, Backbone.js and AngularJS (which clutter the HTML too much), but Meteor really got it, in my opinion. The problem with Meteor is that it forces you to use the full-stack. Natively there is currently no easy way to separate the frontend from the server in Meteor. As i’m using Meteor to build the awesome TunedIn WebApp and we have already an …