Uri Goldshtein
Wassim continue sa série d’interviews de programmeurs de talents. Cette fois c’est Uri Goldshtein qui va devoir affronter un barrage de questions concernant ses domaines de prédilection, à savoir Meteor et Apollo.
WCH: Hi Uri.
URI: Hello Wassim
Can you introduce yourself?
Hi, I’m Uri Goldshtein, I work partly at Meteor, the company behind Meteor (the JavaScript framework) and Apollo. I am also a freelancer and the author of a couple of open source libraries, like Angular-Meteor and Angular2-Apollo.
I guess you’re the perfect person to answer my next question: what is Meteor?
Meteor is a platform for the JavaScript community. If you take for instance .Net and C#, well C# wouldn’t give you so many things without .Net. It is just a language, you need a platform to build on top of it. So, the idea behind Meteor is to give you a complete set of tools and APIs to develop your apps…
…I guess that you mean for both the client and the server?
Yeah! The client, the server and all the developer tools around them. The ecosystem is huge. In JavaScript we also have a huge ecosystem but there is not one platform where it’s super easy to just to get everything you need. If you want to create a JavaScript app, you should have everything you need in one place. It’s kind of the opposite of what’s called ”JavaScript fatigue”, where every day you have a new tool and you don’t know what to do about it. Meteor had evolved around that solution: to give you the complete and best platform, and it’s all completely open source.
How does Meteor work under the hood?
If you think about it, when you develop an app, you need to have a front-end framework, a back-end framework and a way to distribute the data between those two, which is the hardest thing to do. You also need a build tool and a package manager around it. So Meteor gives you all of that in a very simple package. Just what you need to get started. And the important thing about Meteor is that, even sometimes people don’t think about it, everything is pluggable…
What do you mean by “everything is pluggable”?
By “everything”, I mean that you could for instance work with Meteor without its build system, you can use your existing webpack build system if you like. You can use Meteor with React or Angular. You also can use Meteor as a REST server. Meteor is just based on Node: this means you can use any NPM package (or Node code) with Meteor.
Nice! So what are the new features of the version you released a few months ago?
The v1.3 was a very important milestone for us. First of all, we landed native support for NPM. So even though Meteor has its own package manager, which is called Atmosphere, you can now use it with NPM, or just NPM if you want, of course. We’ve also added native ES6 support using BabelJs as a transpiler. With Meteor, you can add any NPM package, so for instance we created a TypeScript package which adds TypeScript support. Of course, both for the server and the client. Another important feature is ES6 modules support! You now have native support for ES6 modules out of the box. And the coolest thing is that you can start using it gradually. And one last thing to mention is the support for easier testing. (suite…)
){kind=link}