Why 2wav Loves Meteor

At 2wav we have been fans of the JavaScript programming language for years. First Node.js enabled running JavaScript on the server and jQuery provided a client-side cross browser JavaScript solution. We enjoyed the flexibility provided by NoSQL data stores such as MongoDB with its JavaScript programming interface. (Find Node.js, JQuery, and MongoDB resources within links.)

The JavaScript platform has come a long way in the last few years, culminating in the release of the ES2015 Ecmascript (JavaScript) spec. We’ve see JavaScript become the fastest growing software development platform, rewarding our early commitment to the language.

We’re fans of the web and all the benefits it provides as an information and application platform, and we love developing cutting edge web experiences for our clients. There are two application design principles central to the solutions we provide to our clients: responsive web design and real time web. Responsive web design means building applications that work across all devices sizes.

The real time web development framework we prefer to use is Meteor, which we find provides the easiest ES2015 JavaScript environment to get up and running. Meteor apps are reactively driven by the data provided to the application, meaning they update in response to changes to the data. This means clients see the world as it currently is and not as it was when the page was loaded. No more reloading pages—users see updates as the data changes.

A few things we really like about Meteor:

1. Meteor uses JavaScript for both the server and the client. The 1.3 release of Meteor brings it into line with the general JavaScript community by adding first class npm module support instead of requiring specially wrapped versions of npm packages as it did previously.
2. Meteor provides support for applications of varying complexity on the client side by supporting both its own templating library as well as Facebook’s React
   and Google’s AngularJS enabling developers to utilize the library that best suits the application’s needs.
3. Meteor uses MongoDB as its data store, but is also working on a next generation data interface built with Facebook’s GraphQL technology that will enable querying other types of data stores such as REST interfaces and SQL databases with a unified query API.

Meteor is the best tool we’ve found for delivering low-cost responsive web applications. We’d love to build a Meteor application for you, so please get in touch!