I think Meteor is pretty awesome technology for building real-time web applications; here's why. A talk I gave at Edinburgh TechMeetup on 11 June 2014.

2. What I’m going to cover
Why Meteor interests me
How it works
Live demo
Problems
Good stuff

3. Rachel Willmer
Founder & CEO, Luzme
I created the world’s first (and best,
IMHO) ebook search site, Luzme.
I’ve spoken at technical and business
events: FutureBook, PyCon UK & IE,
Edinburgh “Disruption in Publishing”.
Luzme has been featured in
TechCrunch, LifeHacker and
BoingBoing.
I like improvising with new technologies
and business disruption.

4. Why Do I Care?
• I’m lazy
• I’m impatient
• I want to Get Stuff Done
• And I need real time data

5. Timeout:
show the problem in my current site

6. Aye, but what is Meteor?
…and how does it work?

7. Meteor: the headlines
• Real-time web application framework
• Javascript on client and server
• Spacebars templating language
• MongoDB on server
• MiniMongo on client
• Pub/Sub built in to framework
• Its release was the largest in Hacker New history (says Wikipedia)
• One of the most starred GitHub repos
• and…

8. Backed by Big Money and People
• Raised $11m in 2012, led by Andreessen
Horowitz, with Matrix Partners
• Also in the round: Maynard Webb (board of Yahoo and
Salesforce), Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail), James
Lindenbaum (helped start Heroku), Dustin Moskovitz (helped
start Facebook), Alexis Ohanian (helped start Reddit), Ron
Conway, Yuri Milner, Aaron Iba and Y Combinator

9. And now the code
(won’t take long, it’s less than 100 lines)

10. And here’s the downside
• Not Yet 1.0
• Infrastructure not completely in place
• Meteor.com documentation hard
• No standard testing framework
• Issues to do with existing mongodb _ids
• Issues to do with hooking up to existing Django user
authentication
But…

11. It’s Not That Bad
• Buy “Discover Meteor” for getting started
• Testing is under heavy discussion, there will
be a unified approach RSN
• Not far from 1.0
…and..

12. The Good Stuff
• Great community
• Can use npm modules
• Atmosphere : user-contributed modules
• Oplog tailing = more efficient than poll’n’diff
• Fast prototyping (auto refresh on code change)
• Can use in PhoneGap apps (apparently)
• Infrastructure coming: Modulus.io or Heroku for hosting;
MongoHQ for mongodb; Kadira for monitoring

13. TL;DR
• It’s awesome! (and good fun to play with)
https://www.meteor.com/
https://www.discovermeteor.com/
http://atmospherejs.com/
• Ask me for a discount code for the
“Discover Meteor” book…

14. QUESTIONS?
Rachel Willmer
rachel@willmer.org
@rwillmer
http://luzme.com
http://infiniteshelfspace.com
This presentation is available at
http://slideshare.net/rwillmer