Meteor 0.4.0: Introducing Spark | Hacker News Reader

Meteor 0.4.0: Introducing Spark

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62 pointsNSMeta23 comments

You guys should focus on authentication. Because this thing is practically useless without it. I'm aware of the authentication branch but this update broke it.

I'd say that the lack of apparent concern regarding something as core and critical as auth is enough for me to write the whole team off permanently.

I'll never use anything made by people so careless yet so self-aggrandizing about their own work.

There's no link to examples or a direct link to the relevant documentation. You have to figure out the difference between 'constant' and 'preserve'.

And one of their principles states: "One Language. Write both the client and the server parts of your interface in JavaScript."

Yet you still have to learn a separate template language, deal with the DOM, browser inconsistencies, etc.

To be fair, if you did do everything in javascript including the user interface, it ends up looking like java (see dojo, google closure, dart, qooxdoo). Javascript isn't well suited for a user interface or template language, but there are dozens of alternatives, some of which are more friendly to declarative UIs: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

To be fair, if you did do everything in javascript including the user interface, it ends up looking like java

Or iOS, see Blossom: https://github.com/fohr/blossom

Frankly, not having to write HTML/CSS and still getting Core Animation-style hardware-accelerated transitions and a normal Core Graphics-style `render()` function is really, really nice.

Why would you name this the same thing as a popular iterative map reduce implementation?

It is probably named the same as many other popular products; "spark" is a common english word. With 7 billion people on this planet it is impossible to avoid naming collisions if you're going to use something from the dictionary.

I agree that the name should be changed. If someone said they built their product "using Spark", it would be fairly ambiguous as to which one they meant, especially if their product has a data mining component.

[http://www.spark-project.org/]

Meteor Spark looks pretty nice though; look forward to trying it out.

That's what I thought they were talking about, too.

Can Spark be used as a standalone library, without the rest of Meteor? That would be pretty cool and I suspect it would be very successful.

From the linked article: "Spark weighs in at 8k gzipped and minified, including all of its dependencies, and it's easily separable from the rest of Meteor."

I just looked at the Spark wiki page[1], and Sizzle is a dependency (although they say it can be removed if you're willing to ignore IE 7). So it is separable, but might not be that small depending on your audience.

[1] https://github.com/meteor/meteor/wiki/Spark

Yay, more data binding libraries. This one needs some better examples before I'll be able to understand at a glance how it works. I currently do my data binding with AngularJS.

Btw, this feature sort of already exists in jQuery. http://api.jquery.com/link/

How possible would it be to use something like Spark or Derby.js's Racer in a django site?

I like the realtime concept/behavior but I want to keep developing in django.

For the real-time data synchronization part, try dropping dotCloud JS into your Django app: http://js.dotcloud.com

It doesn't do live templating, though.

But, how much would I need to write to update the data in realtime as it changes in the backend?

Something like this:

    var people = dotcloud.sync.synchronize('people');
    people.observe(function(type, change) {
        // Update template here
    });

There's a live demo here: http://jsfiddle.net/q2q8b/31/

It will be cool if Meteor could be packaged in a gem and be embedded in parts of a Rails app where client side interaction is heavy.

Isn't Meteor written in Node?

Maybe this is an ignorant question -- but how would you integrate it into a Rails app?

You're right, it runs on Node. However as the poster above pointed out, there would be little practical use in combining this with another framework. Meteor is really it's own platform. The whole point is the unification of the client and server codebase.

I'm not sure about Ember, as I believe it tends to be more opinionated about how much of the page it controls, but Knockout and Backbone are generally pretty easy to use for just a portion of the page.

Steve Sanderson (creator of Knockout) has a really good overview of the most popular client side options (both libraries and frameworks).

http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2012/08/01/rich-javascript-a...

Check out nodeify. It's a gem that allows you to use node in rails for javascript stuff.

https://github.com/dkastner/nodeify

The whole idea of Meteor is to abstract away the server-side APIs commonly found in JS apps.

How does rails fit into that picture at all?

Backbone.js and Ember.js are already great for working with rails/REST apps...

Looks good. I would be interested to see a side-by-side comparison with http://opalang.org, though.

  Does Meteor have an rss feed for their blog?

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