I haven't felt that way about Node.js or even its higher-level frameworks like Express or Batman. This feels like "The One", even though I've been absorbing the docs and screencasts only for the last 20 minutes.
Here's my concern: If I use Meteor as it is intended, and I also want a my application to have API, I'll have to re-implement all of my logic server-side[1]. This seems like a step back, unless I'm misreading things.
I'd love for the Meteor team to address this. Does Meteor make writing APIs easier?
[1]: I'm aware that much of the "client-side" code is executed server-side too, but that's due to Meteor's magically transparent client-side framework.
We couldn't go into everything in the video (it was already too long!), but the piece you're missing is Meteor.methods(). This lets you define methods, which are functions that the client can invoke on the server by calling Meteor.call(). If you choose to also ship the code for these methods to the client (it's optional) then you'll get full latency compensation like we talk about in the video. (This means that Meteor can latency-compensate arbitrarily complex functions, like "read this record, then add 2 to X if this field is false, else create a new record Y.")
In fact, every Meteor app already has an API :) Your Meteor client can connect to any other Meteor server by calling Meteor.connect(), and can then subscribe to any realtime datasets that that server is publishing, or invoke any methods available on that server. This is done with a protocol called DDP, but we could map DDP to REST fairly easily.
What about a non-Meteor client connecting to a Meteor server? Does that client have to understand DDP, or is that what you mean by "we could map DDP to REST" - there's no support for non-DDP clients now, but it's planned?
The latency compensation and Meteor.call() interface sound great, but what I understood by the GP's question about an API was "how can other clients besides mine talk to my app?".
Edit: to clarify I specifically meant a front-end tool to help me leap a level in personal development skill.
I am using backbone for a while and it's backend agnostic which is great !
This one have more resemblance to knockout.js( I am talking client side) and it's MVVM design, backbone doesn't even try to approach that problem.
- backbone - jquery - meteor <- the low level of the high level :)
You use meteor as a foundation to build your application as backbone is more or less your application itself. Think "CoreFoundation" vs "AppKit" kind of difference.
From the docs: "A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container..."
Node.js is very low level and is more analogous to Ruby than Rails.