Meteor gets SQL support

What is a reactive app? Basically, for a web application, this means the client maintains a connection to the server, allowing the server to push data to the client whenever the data changes on the server. No browser reload. No need to submit. It looks more like a fat client app than a traditional web application, because there is full two-way communication between the client and server whenever needed.

Meteor then takes this concept and marries it with a simple client-side key/value store. This makes it seem fast, as a client application can make changes to its local data store and refresh the web page very quickly, updating the server asynchronously. If the server rejects the change (due to security reasons, or any other reason), the client then restores the local data copy to its original state.

The Meteor application framework is built around a "single page application" framework. This means that all of the HTML and Javascript for the entire application are downloaded to the client on the first web page load. When you go from one "page" to another "page", the page doesn't reload; instead Javascript is used to re-render the replace the HTML on the page.

All of this gives Meteor-based web applications a feel that I find to be more similar to that found in IOS/Android native applications. Data still comes from the web, but the rest is handled in JS on the client. I have found that web applications built this way feel faster and more responsive, and behave more like what I expect from traditional apps (i.e. non-web-apps).

There are better explanations elsewhere.