Previewing Meteor's new rendering engine: reactive sortable lists

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44 points·debergalis··7 comments

It appears as if rank is stored as a float. The rank can quickly get to be a very, very small number. It seems at some point, float precision might be an issue and/or length of the rank key. Have you run into this and/or do you have solutions?

Brandon Keepers wrote about trying this idea in Ruby http://opensoul.org/blog/archives/2011/09/06/sortable-lists-... and ran into a float precision issue (see comment).

Maybe I’m using outdated terminology, but why is this called a “rendering engine?” When I think of rendering engines, I think of things that generate pixels.

Rendering is just a form of translation that takes a high-level input and translates that into a frame of pixels. Any UI runtime therefore qualifies as a rendering engine...

Notepad.exe: a rendering engine for text files.

Acrobat is a PDF renderer, ghost view is a postscript renderer, Chrome includes an HTML renderer. Notepad renders text, Word renders word documents. They are also editors, but that is not relevant to the definition.

In web development, render is often used to describe the process of turning a template and data into html either on the server or within the client. More generally it is used for any template+data=>result function.

Back in an earlier version of Meteor I actually implemented drag-sortable and drag-drop lists with jQuery UI and Reactive data sources and it wasn't very difficult. I can't post the source - but there is a simplified demo here: http://grass-freight.meteor.com/

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