Application Development from Outer Space

18 Oct 2016

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The Meteor development platform is aptly named as it indeed hits you like a small body of matter falling from outer space, at least in my experience. Over the past two weeks I’ve spent getting to know Meteor, I definitely came in contact with its steep learning curve. I have never worked with a development platform like Meteor, so there was an inherent amount of new things I needed to learn. On top of that I had to learn all the nuances of Meteor, including the spacebar language for the implementation of templates. The biggest issue I ran into was understanding how the whole system worked. Figuring out what each component does and where to put specific code was a struggle at first for me. After some practice I began to catch on and understand where things were supposed to be and why they belonged there. Despite the many issues I ran into, I still like to think I’ve enjoyed the experience so far, learning to work with Meteor.

Regardless of the struggles I’ve had getting to know Meteor, very early on I could see the power and value of Meteor. If you know what you are doing, it seems like you would be able to generate an application in a short amount of time with relative ease. This is because with Meteor you are only developing in one language, Javascript, and there are numerous packages you can use to aid in the development process. Even if you don’t really know what you are doing, there are examples and tutorials that you can follow relatively easily to obtain the results that you are looking for. Another great thing about Meteor is that it handles both the front-end and the back-end, allowing for seamless full-stack Javascript development. All of these wonderful features of the Meteor development platform make me eager to learn more and begin building my own applications.