So far I’m about 2 weeks into my first meteor project. Techinically it’s not my first web app project so far, but it is the first that I received technical training on. My first project was more of a jump the nest, make it happen sort of project. I had hardly any coding experience and I went through the ruby on rails tutorial on line. I sort of understood it all in the end, but at that point, I had so little programming knowledge that I couldn’t tell what the purpose of each function meant and how it could differ from framework to framework.
With this experience, I was a little more familiar with the overall idea of web development and which files are used for what. Coming into my senior year of Computer Engineering, I knew now going in that the html files would be use to control the layout of the content, while the css files would give it style. I have also learned by this point that js files are used to connect the templated events to the database files.
Using meteor, I have learned a little bit more about how unique it is as a javascript framework and how it’s been implemented to fulfill the rising need for realtime updating mobile interfaces. Meteor uses a mini database (known as mini mongo) to hold some data in a tiny database on the client. This way when data is updated, it displays automatically and then the database updates the server seperately. This saves from trying to transmit a ton of data all at once, just to get a real-time look.
The hardest part of this experience for me is working with such a large collection of files for a project. It is hard to know and sometimes impossible to guess which file requires a complementary snippet in order to iplement one new addition. The typical flow from what I’ve gathered so far is to create an html file with a complimentary js file and then route them together and import them in your index files for each directory so that they are all kept up with. I’m sure with more eperience I will become more familiar with the way these web frameworks tree out their program structure.