How to be a Meteorologist
26 Oct 2017As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently began using an application called Meteor as a platform in school to build websites and applications. As with any new technology, I had to deal with the learning curve, but as I progressed, it became much easier to understand what I was doing. If I had problems with changes not showing up or with missing content, then it was very likely that I had forgotten an import statement or made some type of typo in the names of the files I had used. When I had first started using Meteor, I think the one thing that scared me the most was the fact that there were just so many files associated with the single template application that I first worked with. Every page on the website was a new file, every type of page was sorted into different directories, and there were even separate files and code for the server and client sides of the application. Because of this, the simple act of writing code in the correct place was a little bit of a struggle. However, as I started to understand what I was writing more, I began to think that Meteor was a pretty convenient platform.
From a developer’s point of view, the rather straightforward nature of Meteor was very pleasant to work with. It may have been a little bit of a pain using the command prompt at first, but having complete access and to the application was very useful when working on a project. Being able to use Mongo to view the database in real time and also the way that Meteor would restart the server every time I changed code in real time, were extremely useful. In addition to this, the ability to make certain parts of the database available to only the client or the server at will was something that seems useful for full-scale applications.
My only complaint of sorts is that Meteor seems a little rudimentary, but that may simply be because I lack the experience and/or knowledge in order to utilize Meteor to its full potential. Right now, I’m only writing code with HTML, Javascript, and Mongo, and it seems to me that the breadth of things that are possible with Meteor are quite limited, but maybe from this point forward I’ll be able to learn more about what makes Meteor special.