With Meteor you can write really cool apps in a few minutes. In this example I'm going to give you a live Twitter feed using the streaming API.
You need Meteor, Meteorite, Node.js and npm in order to make this example work. Then execute the following command to install its dependencies:
mrt install
And afterwards you can run the example using:
mrt
Make sure you change the file private/twitter.json. You have to register a Twitter application and paste the keys in this file.
This example is being used in my tutorial. Make sure to check it out.
A few frameworks are being used in this example. Below you can find a listing of them and the reason why I picked those.
Meteor is one of a kind, it's the only platform based upon Node.js that integrates both front-end and back-end, in short: it's a full stack JavaScript platform. With Meteor you can create really cool apps in just a matter of time. For example, this code example contains only 50 lines of HTML and 70 lines of JavaScript.
I'm using the Twitter package that you can find in the npm repository to use the Twitter streaming API in our app.
Moment.js is probably the best date and time manipulation library for JavaScript. In this case I'm using it to format the timestamp available with each tweet.
The best utility belt for JavaScript, that's how you could call Underscore.js. It provides a lot of tools that make the life of a JavaScript developer much easier. In this case it's being used to find a specific object inside an array, but Meteor also uses it behind the screens because it's just simply the best.
UI libraries like Twitter Bootstrap are totally hot today. I'm personally more a fan of Semantic UI because I like their naming convention and it has great extra components like the feed component that I use for this app.
Meteor's architecture is entirely driven based upon their collections that can be persisted into MongoDB. If you don't need the persistence, you should take a look at the Meteor streams package. I'm using it to stream the tweets to the client.