Update: Many others are trying to do the same thing, and some are farther along than I. Some possible alternatives:
- http://meteor.github.io/blaze/ (by slava, but old)
- https://github.com/eface2face/meteor-client
Hypothesis: More people would try Meteor if they could evaluate its front-end behavior first, independently of its server components.
I have released a package to Bower, and to Npm, called Mini-Meteor. This gives developers access to the Reactive capabilities of Meteor, including utilities for making reactive JS objects. It can be used as a replacement for Angular, Ember, or Backbone, though it will be most familiar to those accustomed to the Knockout library.
- Form Validation
- Reactive SVG
- TODOMVC - coming soon !
See http://manual.meteor.com for a focus on the reactive components of Tracker, which are exposed under the Meteor global in Mini-Meteor. See http://docs.meteor.com for general Meteor info.
(Isn't it just like an engineer to jump right to the solution?)
The decision to choose a JavaScript tool is a complicated one to make already. Since most tools out there assume you have a server already to speak REST to, developers don't know how to figure the Full Meteor into their comparisons. They may already have a substantial Rails investment, or can't run Mongo, and thus will not even look at Meteor to solve their front-end woes.
Following the convention of MiniMongo, MiniMeteor exposes a Meteor global.
This object's main method of interest is Meteror.run - an alias for Tracker.autorun.
I thought Tracker was a little too vague, and autorun sounded a bit magical
(obscuring the fact that the function is run immediately, for example).
So Meteor.run runs the function you pass it, sets up dependencies, and reruns
the function as those dependencies require.
I included ReactiveDict (renamed to ReactiveMap), and the ES5-property based ReactiveObject,
but did not yet try to include much beyond that, for lack of a modular build system.
See The Future for more.
In this version, you have no Mini-Mongo, router, Blaze templating, or HTTP.
I just created a single JS file containing Tracker (renamed to Meteor) and its dependencies.
I included underscore, but not JQuery, and put the 30kb minified file on a CDN, in Bower and in Npm.
This is a start, and is enough to demonstrate DOM data-binding that is superior to many other JS frameworks
in terms of less code, and fewer concepts to understand, and no conventions to memorize.
- An automated way of regenerating from meteor source.
- A real module system, so it need not ship Unserscore or JQuery.
- A builder, like for JQuery UI, to create builds optionally with Blaze, MiniMongo, or other modules, ideally related to ISObuild
- It should include its own tests.
- MDG could support this, (or support my doing it-that'd be fine too)
Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts. The few fans of other frameworks I showed this code to wondered where all the complexity was, and I explained there just wasn't any! I hope this enables you to compare Meteor-style reactive programming with other JS tools, and share the Meteoric love with those who are stuck with other servers, or without the freedom to choose a back-end just yet.
