Deep Impact
20 Oct 2016
For the past two weeks my class has been learning, using, and getting used to Meteor. At the start of the course, it was there a distant and vaguely scary thing, looming off in the distance. And as it approached in our schedual it only seemed to be turning into a bigger and scarier challenge to tackle, and once it was upon us, it took some getting used to. Getting over the learning curve is still an ongoing process, but in the end I believe that Meteor is no armageddon level event.
Meteor is my ICS class’ example of a modern, internet-based, client-server application architecture. Starting off I was a little overwhelmed by just how different it all was; starting it up through the command prompt, the strange folder architecture, all manner of new plugins and functions, and the way it automatically reflected changes I made (almost) instantly was quite a change from what I was habituated with. The long load times on my poor little laptop were worrysome, at times it felt like my rig was going to burst into flames as it struggled with everything going on between IntelliJ, GitHub’s desktop app, and Meteor.
After a brief adjustment period, in which many a ‘hello-world’ app was built, I now feel like I’m now beginning to get a hold of things. I can definitively see the advantages to Meteor over the standard client/server architecture. Due to how it was designed, Meteor allows the server to communicate the same, or different parts of a database to multiple clients simultaneously and changes are relfected as they are committed. An added bonus to this is being able to see your changes in action almost immediately with little to no action on your part, once its up and running. Additionally, I get the feeling that this functionality will really shine when applied to a group project or something larger, so in the coming weeks I hope to put it to the test.
Today also marks the passing of the last in class WoD, which suprisingly to me, felt like a breeze rather than being hit by a twister. This surprised me because the WoD featured a continuation of the practice WoDs my class has been doing all week, some of which felt like going through a towering inferno. The hardest parts of using Meteor have been the building of the app and getting it all set up, but after one part or component is working, the rest, for me at least, tend to quickly follow suite. Working with Meteor is starting to become bearable, hopefully with more use (and maybe a better rig) it will continue to get easier.
