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Build Applications with Meteor
Build Applications with Meteor

Build Applications with Meteor: Isomorphic JavaScript web development

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Build Applications with Meteor

Building a Shopping Cart

In this chapter, we will build a simple create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) application that will allow the user to add items to a shopping cart, remove them, update the quantity of each item, and track the total price of all added items. This is not, by any means, an e-commerce app but a brief overview of data handling with Meteor. For the frontend view layer, we will use React; also, we will take advantage of Meteor's reactive data package react-meteor-data to handle all the data changes and the dynamic rendering.

First, we will start with a very basic CRUD implementation and, moving forward, we'll refactor the app with the introduction of more concepts.

Here's what this chapter covers:

  • An overview of basic project structures and installation of the required packages
  • An overview of the application architecture
  • Inserting sample data in MongoDB
  • Implementation of...

Creating the project structure

Ctrl + Alt + T will open the terminal, change the directory to the desired location, create a shopping cart app with the meteor CLI, and install all the required packages.

Copy the following commands serially to create the app and install the packages:

>> meteor create shopping_cart
>> npm install
>> npm install react --save
>> npm install react-dom --save
>> meteor add react-meteor-data
>> npm install --save react react-addons-pure-render-mixin

Starting from the client side, let's delete all the default folders and create the following files and folders:

How to structure your app is completely up to you. For quick prototypes, you can use the defaults and just add more into the directories or, if you have a favorite open source project and you like its setup, you can copy the design from it. However, in real life, how the app is architected...

On the server

On the server-side, we have two files: index.js and insertData.js. There is also a private folder where we can define sample data that we can work with. Meteor will treat the private folder as an assets folder and will not bundle it with the rest of the execution code, which makes it a perfect place to have the test data.

In the private folder in file, products.json will have the following fields:

private/products.json

The fields of the Products collection are as follows:

id: This is the product ID.

title: This refers to a product title.

price: This is the price per unit.

inventory: This is the currently available product inventory in the store.

department: This refers to the department ID the product belongs to.

In the root of the application tree, we also have a shared folder where we can have modules used by both the client and the server.

In there, we define the two Collections...

Building the application components

Let's start building the application from top to bottom. The first two entries in the app are the index.html and index.js files. You can name them main.js or app.js or anything you want. I have a preference of naming index (starting with lowercase) as the first entry of any directory in my apps. That said, all React components should be capitalized when you import them; otherwise, React will thread them as HTML tags. To keep it intuitive, you can have the component names and their files' names capitalized.

In the index.html file, we can have our root DOM element:

<head>
<title>Shopping Cart</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="root"></div>
</body>

We have a pretty simple HTML with only the <head> and <body> tags, and one <div> that will be the root of the parent top-level component, App.

In...

Adding router to the application

In our sample data, we have specified two departments: music and books. Currently, our App parent component renders the products and the cart into a single page.

In Single Page Applications (SPA), most of the time we want to give the user the best user experience by separating parts of the app into pages. The advantages of client site routing are that the user can navigate through different URLs without loading and reloading/refreshing the pages. This great user experience comes with a price. One of the challenges for client routing is the amount of code that the application initially needs to load for all pages. This problem can be solved by splitting the code by pages/routes and lazy loading only those parts of the code for the pages that a user visits.

For this example, we'll use the react-router library to manage the client-side routing:

In total, we have six...

Meteor methods

To make our app work with methods, we need to create tree methods and move all the edits from the client to the server.

Let's place all the methods in a folder called api on the root of the client. The concept of Methods is very similar to Ajax calls to the server:

On the server, we can define them when on the startup:

  Meteor.startup(() => {
….. Methods definition
});
Meteor.methods({
cartInsert: function(product) {
CartCollection.insert({
'title' : product.title,
'price' : product.price,
'inventory' : product.inventory,
'quantity': 1
});
},

In Meteor.methods, we can define all the methods.

Let's start by adding the product method in the cart.

The cartInsert method is the name of the method and, in the body function, we can just copy exactly the same code that we had on the client.

To...

Creating the project structure


Ctrl + Alt + T will open the terminal, change the directory to the desired location, create a shopping cart app with the meteor CLI, and install all the required packages.

Copy the following commands serially to create the app and install the packages:

>> meteor create shopping_cart
>> npm install
>> npm install react --save
>> npm install react-dom --save
>> meteor add react-meteor-data
>> npm install --save react react-addons-pure-render-mixin

Starting from the client side, let's delete all the default folders and create the following files and folders:

How to structure your app is completely up to you. For quick prototypes, you can use the defaults and just add more into the directories or, if you have a favorite open source project and you like its setup, you can copy the design from it. However, in real life, how the app is architected can depend on many factors. Often, we work on a mixture of new and legacy code and sometimes...

On the server


On the server-side, we have two files: index.js and insertData.js. There is also a private folder where we can define sample data that we can work with. Meteor will treat the private folder as an assets folder and will not bundle it with the rest of the execution code, which makes it a perfect place to have the test data.

In the private folder in file, products.json will have the following fields:

private/products.json

The fields of the Products collection are as follows:

id: This is the product ID.

title: This refers to a product title.

price: This is the price per unit.

inventory: This is the currently available product inventory in the store.

department: This refers to the department ID the product belongs to.

In the root of the application tree, we also have a shared folder where we can have modules used by both the client and the server.

In there, we define the two Collections that we will be using: Products and Cart:

export const ProductsCollection = new Mongo.Collection('products...
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Key benefits

  • Develop a set of real-world applications each exploring different features of Meteor
  • Make your app more appealing by adding reactivity and responsiveness to it
  • Work with the most powerful feature of Meteor—the “full stack reactivity”—through building real-time applications with many third party libraries

Description

This book starts with the basic installation and overview of the main components in Meteor. You’ll get hands-on multiple versatile applications covering a wide range of topics from adding a front-end views with the hottest rendering technology React to implementing a microservices oriented architecture.All the code is written with ES6/7 which is the latest significantly improved JavaScript language. We’ll also look at real-time data streaming, server to server data exchange, responsive styles on the front-end, full-text search functionality, and integration of many third-party libraries and APIs using npm. By the end of the book, you’ll have the skills to quickly prototype and even launch your next app idea in a matter of days.

Who is this book for?

If you are a developer who is looking forward to taking your application development skills with Meteor to next level by getting your hands-on different projects, this book is for you.

What you will learn

  • See how Meteor fits in the modern web application development by using its reactive data system
  • Make your front-end behave consistently across environments by implementing a predictable state container with Redux
  • Get familiar with React and overview of Angular 2
  • Add a map to your application with a real-time geolocation
  • Plugin into Meteor social media APIs like Twitter's streaming and Facebook's Messenger
  • Add search functionality from scratch to your existing app and data
  • Add responsiveness with Bootstrap 4 and Google's Material Design using Less and Sass
  • Distribute your data across machines and data centers by adding Apache Cassandra to your existing stack.
  • Learn how to scale your microservices with the high performant language neutral framework gRPC.
  • Learn how to query multiple data sources using GraphQL.
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Length: 388 pages
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Language : English
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
Foundation of Meteor Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Shopping Cart Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Style Your React Components with Bootstrap and Material Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Real-Time Twitter Streaming Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Developing Kanban Project Management Tool Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Real-Time Search Application Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Real-Time Maps Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Build a Chatbot with Facebook’s Messenger Platform Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Build Internet of Things Platform Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
(3 Ratings)
5 star 66.7%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 33.3%
1 star 0%
Julien Jul 23, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book not only cover Meteor. You're going to learn how to develop professional app along to the best web technologies, from Bootstrap to gRPC.The first chapters are more about how Meteor works and deals with other libraries.Chapter after chapter, this book cover several technologies to help you choose the best ones for your needs.Actually this book is for both Meteor developers and full-stack web developer enthusiast.In spite of some typos, everything is clear and well explained. The book contains lots of exercises that you are encouraged to do to put in practice concepts previously seen.I'm happy to have this book in my library.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Barnhardt Enterprises, Inc Nov 22, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Very detailed and well written. This is a great reference for Meteor developers as well as beginners.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Justin R McCormick Oct 17, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
I bought this book off the 5-star review and figured it would jump start development with meteor. After going through the first few chapters, I am moving onto the next possible candidate. Most of the source code examples don't work, have typos, and missing end of lines. As well as the source examples being wrong, the source examples are not presented clearly by chopping newline's into the next line of the book etc. I'm not sure if this was a printing error, but it started to become a pain.Overall, this was a brief overview for different sections and I would continue reading if the examples weren't chopped & screwed (remix) in a way. After looking at other books, I clearly recommend going with something else. Just my two cents. Trying to save someone the time of buying this unless code examples that don't work will not bother you.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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