Table of Contents

Copyright

Brief Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

About this Book

About the Cover Illustration

1. Look—a shooting star!

Chapter 1. A better way to build apps

1.1. Introducing Meteor

1.1.1. The story behind Meteor

1.1.2. The Meteor stack

1.1.3. Isomorphic frameworks: full-stack JavaScript

1.1.4. Processing in the browser: running on distributed platforms

1.1.5. Reactive programming

1.2. How Meteor works

1.2.1. Core projects

1.2.2. Isobuild and the CLI tool

1.2.3. Client code vs. server code

1.3. Strengths and weaknesses

1.3.1. Where Meteor shines

1.3.2. Challenges when using Meteor

1.4. Creating new applications

1.4.1. Setting up a new project

1.4.2. Starting the application

1.5. Dissecting the default project

1.5.1. helloWorld.css

1.5.2. helloWorld.html

1.5.3. helloWorld.js

1.6. Summary

Chapter 2. My fridge! A reactive game

2.1. Application overview

2.2. Initial setup

2.2.1. Setting up a new project

2.3. Creating a layout

2.3.1. Setting the styles

2.3.2. Adding the templates

2.4. Adding content to the database in real time

2.4.1. Storing items in the database

2.4.2. Connecting data to templates

2.4.3. Adding a defined set of products

2.5. Moving items into the fridge

2.5.1. Adding jQuery-UI to the project

2.5.2. Defining drop targets for items

2.5.3. Allowing items to be draggable

2.6. Deploying to meteor.com and using the fridge

2.7. Summary

2. 3, 2, 1—impact!

Chapter 3. Working with templates

3.1. Introduction to templates

3.2. Working with templates

3.2.1. The Blaze engine

3.2.2. Organizing template files

3.3. Creating dynamic HTML templates

3.3.1. Double and triple-braced tags (expressions)

3.3.2. Inclusion tags (partials)

3.3.3. Block tags

3.3.4. Helpers

3.4. Handling events

3.4.1. Template event maps

3.4.2. Event propagation

3.4.3. Preventing the browser’s default behavior

3.5. The template life cycle

3.6. Summary

Chapter 4. Working with data

4.1. Meteor’s default data sources

4.1.1. What makes a data source reactive?

4.1.2. How reactive data is connected to functions

4.2. Building a house-sitter app

4.2.1. Setting up templates

4.2.2. Connecting to a database and declaring collections

4.3. Working with the Session object

4.3.1. The Session object

4.3.2. Using Session to store selected drop-down values

4.3.3. Creating a reactive context using Tracker.autorun

4.4. Working with MongoDB collections

4.4.1. Querying documents in MongoDB

4.4.2. Working with Meteor collections

4.4.3. Initializing a collection

4.4.4. Querying collections

4.4.5. Display collection data in a template

4.4.6. Updating data in a collection

4.4.7. Inserting new data into a collection

4.4.8. Removing data from a collection

4.5. Summary

Chapter 5. Fully reactive editing

5.1. The reactive editing workflow

5.2. Reactive front ends vs. DOM manipulation

5.3. Staging changes in a local collection

5.4. Displaying collection data within a form

5.4.1. Adding array index information to an #each loop

5.5. Reactive updates using a local collection

5.5.1. Event map for the houseForm template

5.5.2. Event map for the plantFieldset template

5.6. Implementing a simple notifications system

5.6.1. Adding a notifications template

5.6.2. Adding a status property

5.6.3. Using a Session variable to trigger notifications

5.7. Summary

Chapter 6. Users, authentications, and permissions

6.1. Adding users to an application

6.1.1. Adding password authentication

6.1.2. Registration and password reset

6.1.3. Setting up email

6.2. Authenticating users with OAuth

6.2.1. An introduction to OAuth

6.2.2. Integrating Facebook authentication

6.2.3. Integrating other OAuth providers

6.3. Managing user permissions, roles, and groups

6.3.1. Managing permissions with allow/deny

6.4. Summary

Chapter 7. Exchanging data

7.1. Publications and subscriptions

7.1.1. publish() and subscribe()

7.1.2. Global subscriptions

7.1.3. Template-level subscriptions

7.1.4. Parameterizing subscriptions

7.1.5. Publishing aggregated data to a client-only collection

7.1.6. Turning an aggregation publication into a reactive data source

7.1.7. Limiting data visibility by user ID

7.2. Meteor methods

7.2.1. Removing the insecure package

7.2.2. Using methods to write data to collections

7.3. Summary

Chapter 8. Routing using Iron.Router

8.1. Routing in web applications

8.2. Client-side routing

8.2.1. Adding Iron.Router

8.2.2. Creating your first routes

8.2.3. Defining a layout depending on a route

8.2.4. Setting the data context depending on a route

8.2.5. Data subscriptions with Iron.Router

8.3. Advanced routing methods

8.3.1. Using named routes and link helpers

8.3.2. Working with active routes for better navigation links

8.3.3. Waiting for external libraries to load

8.3.4. Organizing routes as controllers

8.3.5. Extending the route process using hooks

8.3.6. Creating an Iron.Router plug-in

8.4. Server-side routing with a REST API

8.5. Summary

Chapter 9. The package system

9.1. The foundation of all applications

9.2. Using Isopacks

9.2.1. Version Solver and semantic versioning

9.2.2. Finding packages

9.2.3. Adding and removing Isopacks

9.2.4. Updating packages

9.3. Using npm packages

9.4. Creating an Isopack

9.4.1. Creating a package

9.4.2. Declaring package metadata

9.4.3. Adding package functionality

9.4.4. Testing Isopacks using tinytest

9.4.5. Publishing

9.5. Summary

Chapter 10. Advanced server methods

10.1. Reintroducing Node.js

10.1.1. Synchronous code

10.1.2. Asynchronous code

10.2. Asynchronous functions using fibers

10.2.1. Introducing multitasking to the event loop

10.2.2. Binding callbacks to a fiber with wrapAsync

10.2.3. Unblocking method calls for a single client

10.2.4. Creating fibers with bindEnvironment

10.3. Integrating external APIs

10.3.1. Making RESTful calls with the http package

10.3.2. Using a synchronous method to query an API

10.3.3. Using an asynchronous method to call an API

10.4. Uploading files to a collection

10.4.1. Uploading files to the database

10.5. Summary

3. Leaving the crater

Chapter 11. Building and debugging

11.1. The Meteor build process

11.1.1. Build stages

11.1.2. Running with the --production flag

11.1.3. Load order

11.1.4. Adding build stages via packages

11.1.5. Adding a custom build stage

11.2. Accessing running applications

11.2.1. Using the interactive server shell

11.2.2. Debugging using node-inspector

11.3. Creating browser applications

11.3.1. Application configuration using Meteor.settings

11.3.2. Building Meteor projects

11.4. Creating mobile applications

11.4.1. Hybrid apps with Cordova

11.4.2. Adding mobile platforms

11.4.3. Configuring mobile applications

11.4.4. Adding mobile functionality

11.5. Summary

Chapter 12. Going into production

12.1. Preparing for production

12.1.1. Using version control

12.1.2. Testing functionality: the Velocity framework

12.1.3. Estimating and testing load

12.1.4. Server administration

12.1.5. Checklist

12.2. Setup and deployment

12.2.1. The simplest deployment: meteor.com

12.2.2. All-inclusive hosting: cloud providers

12.2.3. Full flexibility: manual setup

12.3. Connecting the pieces

12.3.1. Environment variables

12.3.2. Connecting Meteor to MongoDB

12.4. Scaling strategies

12.4.1. Active-passive high availability with redundancy

12.4.2. Single-component deployments

12.4.3. Redundancy and load balancing

12.4.4. Bulletproof availability

12.5. Summary

Appendix A. Installing Meteor

A.1. Prerequisites

A.2. Installing Meteor on Linux and Mac OS X

A.3. Installing Meteor on Windows

A.4. Running Meteor using Vagrant

Appendix B. The anatomy of MongoDB

B.1. The MongoDB components

B.1.1. mongod: databases and shards

B.1.2. mongos: query routing

B.1.3. mongoc: configuration servers

B.1.4. Replica sets

B.2. Setting up MongoDB

Setting up oplog tailing

Setting up an oplog user

Appendix C. Setting up nginx

C.1. Load balancing with nginx

C.1.1. Installing nginx on Ubuntu

C.1.2. Installing on Debian 7 (Wheezy)

C.2. Configuring as a load balancer

C.2.1. Creating a site configuration file

C.2.2. Defining Meteor servers

C.2.3. Forwarding requests to the back-end servers

C.2.4. Activating the nginx site

C.3. Serving static content with nginx

C.3.1. Serving CSS and JavaScript

C.3.2. Serving media files and images

C.3.3. Enabling gzip compression

C.4. Setting up SSL with nginx

  

Index

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Examples