Meteor on Janik von Rotz

Meteor project structure

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 16:20:06 +0000

Get the latest version of this specification here: https://gist.github.com/d4755eb1b7a9d6b08515408ea6fd69bb

The Meteor project structure (MPS) is a proposal for a simple file and folder naming specification.

There are several basic distinctions when building a Meteor project structure. First there is a client, server and an imports folder. All folders have specific naming rules and differ in their structure.

Deploy your Meteor app with PM2

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 14:12:42 +0000

PM2 is a well-known node process manager. Not so well-known is its deployment feature. With pm2 you can reasonable easy deploy any node application. As Meteor is always a node app at its heart I’ve decided to deploy my current Meteor project with PM2.

Meteor register LDAP login request handler

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:53:56 +0000

One requirement for my current Meteor project was that a user must login with their ActiveDirectory account. This means that Meteor must be able to authenticate against LDAP. In atmosphere there are already a few packages available which implement and support LDAP authentication. However, they are either outdated or difficult to configure. This is why I’ve decided to build my own custom login request handler for Meteor.

Authenticate Meteor accounts with the Apollo GraphQL API

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 10:21:20 +0000

One of the popular features of Meteor is its accounts package. As you know, it makes it fairly easy to add a user authentication solution to your Meteor app or add support for different oAuth services. With the possibility to integrate an Apollo GraphQL API into your Meteor app this became a bit more difficult. The Apollo stack does not support an out of the box solutions to authenticate users with Meteor accounts. Jonas Helfer, one of the Apollo core devs, proposed two ways to authenticate users with your app:

Graphql with Apollo, Meteor and React

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 19:39:30 +0000

For my last project I had to build a web application to administrate a MongoDB database. Due to using Meteor quite a lot I heard about Graphql and the Apollostack. Graphql, which is a specification done by Facebook engineers, promises to be the better REST API (which I hope it is). I became curious and decided the build the server API with Apollo. First I tried to evade using the Meteor as build system as I don’t want to get too accustomed to this full-stack ecosystem. However, building a live-reload server and client build system in ES6 with Node.js, Babel and Webpack was simply too much work compared to building this simple web app. So in result this was my stack:

OLMOTO - An app built by beginners

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 12:30:05 +0000

One month ago I started teaching a friend the basics of JavaScript with Meteor, Mantra and React. Together we’ve built an app to create and share events with friends. It was an awesome experience. Yesterday we launched a private version on heroku. For us this was a great accomplishment. I learned a lot from this project and thought about sharing it with world.

https://codeberg.org/janikvonrotz/olmoto

Some technical features and challenges we solved:

Meteor create user with a profile and custom attributes

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 20:34:48 +0000

For Meteor there are not many options left when choosing a user account package. The built-in option is the only use- and successful solution so far. The package is well documented and works like a charm. However, whenever I set up the account system in Meteor I am confronted with these two scenarios:

How can I extend the user profile object with data from a registration form? (A user should be able to edit the profile data himself later on.)
And how can I add other attributes to the user collection object? (A user should not be able to change a custom attribute himself later on.)

These are two fundamental obstacles almost every developer faces when setting up the account system. There are a lot of solutions out there on how to do this in Meteor properly, but a lot of them are poorly described and make it difficult the get the right idea of how the account system works. It got even more difficult due to API changes and Meteor itself that changed a lot over years. Now I would like to give a good example for this two questions.

Meteor productive deployment blank page

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 10:16:07 +0000

First some background. I’ve built a Meteor app and decided to deploy it to Heroku. There are many short and simple guides out there on how to do that. As I did so and opened the App for the first on Heroku I simply received a blank page. Where did my javascript code go? Heroku logs didn’t tell much.

Meteor and Mantra - Routing redirect

Thu, 26 May 2016 10:03:22 +0000

Recently I started using Mantra to develop my Meteor apps. As with any other framework You’ll find a lot of answers to common questions in a related forum or any other resource. However I couldn’t get a good answer on how to implement routing logic properly. The Mantra specs also don’t tell much about how to approach it. So here’s my solution.

Meteor and React: Markdown editor with draft.js and marked.js

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 09:15:29 +0000

Recently I switched my current project from Meteor 1.2 to 1.3. While doing so I reworked the code for my markdown editor. When created the markdown editor in the first place I learned about the necessity of a solid platform to build web editors. So this time I used draft.js as base. Facebook open sourced draft.js a few months ago. They use it almost everywhere on Facebook page, so it should be well-tested.

The markdown editor you’re going to build has these features:

Instant html preview rendering
Support for GitHub flavoured syntax and markdown tables
Drag and drop file upload.
Copy and paste file upload.

Optionally: File upload with Meteor and FS Collection.

Meteor and React: Fullscreen Viewer Component

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:51:29 +0000

Another post as result of my Meteor React experience. This is a simple approach to build a fullscreen viewer for any React component.

Meteor and React: Bootstrap Modal

Sat, 05 Mar 2016 12:42:05 +0000

I would like to share my great experience I had with Meteor and React. This time I want to show how I’ve built a bootstrap modal component. There are already a lot of solutions out there, but none of them were suitable.

Here’s how you can get a neat bootstrap modal for your Meteor React project.

Meteor White Paper

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 21:05:20 +0000

Introduction

Today’s internet would not work without web applications. Web applications made the web dynamic and extended its targeted audience. The applications made it possible for companies to create new business models and sell their goods and services online. They became popular due to the ubiquity of web browsers, and the convenience of using a web browser as a client (Wikipedia, 2015). Undoubtedly, the technology to build web applications is the cornerstone to enabling the enterprises to keep up with the pace of business. Life cycles of products have become shorter while the demand raised at the same time. Enterprises have to accelerate their application development process to stay competitive in the future.