yes, fall in love indeed - because for me, a mostly c++ person, the recent developments in web, specifically the rise of javascript as a powerful tool to build apps, went past too quickly to observe and have time to play with.
but meteor provides an excellent fundament, a basis, to build javascript/nodejs apps with really not that much frontend knowledge.
and i could see this pretty much the first few hours after i started playing with meteor.
why?
i had some basic knowledge about javascript, and the knowledge that nodejs is a huge callbacks mess which i don't want to have anything to do with.
but here came meteor, and it wraps nodejs so nicely, that i never need to bother about it - and instead with the help of familiar paradigms - RPC, client/server - allows to easily jump and play with things like bootstrap, jquery etc without worrying about servers setup etc
not surprisingly i started with meteor tutorial at
http://meteortips.com/first-meteor-tutorial and i must say it is great in laying out the basic principles of building apps with meteor - Spacebars, publications, methods etc.
the tempo is well paced and examples quite nice too.
actually i wanted this post to document the steps for deploying the app i built to
heroku.com.
heroku uses something called buildpacks, to help deploying apps requiring certain development tools in the hosting enviroment. so once you find out that the recommended build pack for meteor is
meteor-buildpack-horse the rest is easy, because the github page has detailed info how to deploy.
except for one step - if you're using some configuration, provided in a (json) file - e.g. settings.json - in this case the tip provided by geekforbrains at
https://gist.github.com/geekforbrains/c8a11d128f13d038b119 is invaluable:
heroku config:add METEOR_SETTINGS="$(cat settings.json)"
mmm...it is good (actually priceless) to have good logging for your app, otherwise it would be quite head-breaking discovering deployment errors - the case "but it works fine on my machine, why doesn't it run on the server? :(", so a simple logging message, 'handling' the situation with the missing settings file, helped me resolve the problem within minutes, instead of, potentially, hours - and that trying to find the error remotely, with potentially multiple deployments and code changes..blah, blah,,,you get the idea
the work on the app is till under progress - it is deployed and available at
http://instaplaylist.co.
the idea is to drag and drop youtube-hosted videos from various sites and view later on this site (instead of on youtube, which also provides this, and better, and nicer - but hey :))
still under progress - misses a landing page with info etc, but it is fully functional, but lots of ideas to expand it, given time.
i'll do my best to post the source to github as well - maybe in a different blog i'll also make a more elaborate post on my experience with the awesome
meteorjs
update 18.09.2016: for a new app i had a problem with deploying to
heroku:
- first deploy works fine, logs display meteor 1.2.1
- next day a new deploy - fails, logs display meteor 1.4.1
the solution was to run
heroku config:set BUILDPACK_CLEAR_CACHE=1
(as mentioned here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38672782/heroku-rejecting-push-of-a-meteor-app)
