Since you are reading this, you may be hoping for a list of policies and procedures to make your projects run more smoothly. I’m sorry to report that it isn’t that easy. Agile techniques are not going to save you. New technologies aren’t in themselves a solution. Adding new, intelligent people will not help. Working […]
Consider a modern system based on React, Redux, Meteor and MongoDB. Such a system conforms to an architectural ideal that I call Absolute MVC, in which the user interface is updated exclusively in response to state changes (i.e., UI actions or back-end changes). Meteor Live Query is state-of-the-art with respect to detecting back-end changes and pushing […]
In early 2017, I decided to convert one of my client’s applications from Blaze to React. This is the story of that conversion effort. If you are a Meteor developer, this post will likely be interesting to you, particularly if you are considering moving to React. For ordinary folks, I’ve done my best to minimize […]
One of the compelling benefits of Meteor/Node.js is that a single language, JavaScript, can be used on client and server. Meteor developers use the word isomorphic to describe JavaScript code that has been written to run anywhere. To make that possible, your JavaScript functions must adhere to certain coding conventions. After some experimentation and false starts, we have devised […]
For almost two years, I’ve been developing Meteor using several Ubuntu VMWare virtual machines running inside a Windows host; this weekend, I moved all of my Meteor development functions to Windows native, taking advantage of the new Meteor Windows support. You might ask: why would one do this? The main reason is that it will smooth out some kinks […]
Beneath any modern software project lies a vast, invisible effort. The typical user sees only the the tip of an enormous iceberg. Seemingly-simple ideas can take longer to implement than one would expect. Pushing an application into production requires many crucial decisions in disciplines ranging from systems design to engineering to security to performance management. It takes balance and maturity to face the realities […]
Since my last post in January 2014, I have thrown myself head-first into the world of JavaScript, Meteor, Node.js and MongoDB, working on two major (i.e., paid) projects plus one unpaid project. The first paid project is a system to support sales functions of an established firm in the nutritional supplements space. The system is […]
After working heads-down with Meteor and MongoDB for four months, I haven’t run into any show-stopping snags. You’ve likely run into the acronym LAMP which describes an enormously popular application architecture based on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The combination of JavaScript, Meteor and MongoDB is so powerful and cost-effective, it deserves its own acronym. […]
It has been almost two weeks since my last blog post. During this time, I’ve been working hands-on with Meteor, Node.js, MongoDB and Twitter’s Bootstrap framework. One of my main objectives was to find gotchas that might disqualify Meteor as a viable solution for upcoming projects. During this time, I spent quite a bit of […]
I have an opinion forming about Rails. It does seem to handle everything, but Rails is making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. If one could compare Grails to a carrier battle group, Rails might be seen as a rickety pirate ship. Although Ruby (the language) is fine, Rails seems clunky, somewhat […]