Getting to Grips with Meteor
23 Mar 2017
Meteor Ups and Downs
In my previous essay, I talked about how I’ve been learning Meteor, which is a Javascript web framework that combines both the front-end and back-end. Coding itself is very difficult, and having to code around a very complex and large framework compounds this even more. It takes time and effort to understand the framework and what it is capable of. Particularly, I’ve been having trouble getting a grip on the control flow of projects being built with meteor. Since Meteor is so powerful and complex, it is difficult to determine how all of the Javascript, HTML, and CSS are interacting with one another to produce the web app. It’s easy enough to get one page up and running, but when you have many pages that need to connect to each and code that keeps everything in the background running properly it is easy to get lost and overwhelmed. One other thing I’m finding difficult is debugging the code. I touched on this in the previously mentioned essay, but it is very easy to break the whole application with one bad line of code and finding the bad code can be quite the adventure.
The instructor for our class provided us with templates for Meteor that we’re using for our final project and they’ve been immensely helpful. The templates allow us to easily add pages and connect them and also gives us examples to update the database in the backend. However, when I try to dig deeper and understand the code and how it is all interacting with each other, I eventually lose the plot. At this point it may seem like I’m whining, but it is in fact the opposite. When I started this class one programming skill I felt we hadn’t been taught was how to jump into and work on larger projects. Up to this point all programming assignments I had done for my Computer Science major were all programs I had built up scratch. When you build something yourself from the bottom up it is easy to understand everything that is going on with the program. This is the first time I had been exposed to working with larger applications that people had already built, and while it is difficult, I’m enjoying every second of it. In regards to Meteor, I think it is a very powerful and awesome framework. At this point some of the things happening under the hood seem like magic to me, but with time and effort I plan to change that.