Julkaisupäivämäärä: Feb 10, 2016 12:29:12 AM
Prelude
It's almost a year and half ago when I needed to develop an application prototype, quickly. I've a long history of J2EE/JEE web application development but after a break I wanted to learn something new and try different web application platforms. I considered a variety of different technologies and stacks. You'll find many of those listed in http://stackshare.io/. StackShare records hundreds of stacks, tools, utilities. So it's not easy to choose one and commit learning and working with it. From my experience and for me it takes about three months of calendar time to get comfortable with new application building technology. That is beyond every frameworks one-page-trivial-hello-world where the world turns upside down on page two with a lots of fill me in's.
Getting the path laid up
The path that laid me to MeteorKitchen started with NodeJs. After realizing that it is actually just (quite popular) runner of JavaScript modules or packages as they're known in the NodeJs world. So I started to search NodeJs packages which would make Web application development a breeze. Well, there's was many to choose from. Many for the front-end, and many for the back-end. I still struggle with the memory of browsing through the npm-archive for active packages with proper maintainers. I'll hit this same issue with MetorJS later on.
I tried Express but found out it's already phasing out, so did't want to use that. There were may others. But somehow I started to like to NodeJS ecosystem and JavaScript for web application development for full stack. I got bit by the JavaScript variable and function declaration hoisting. And so tried some (Laravel was one of them) PHP frameworks, considered RoR again, went to the other side with golang. After couple of those three month periods with new and exciting technologies I found myself building the prototype application with MeteorJS. I actually built couple of versions using totally hand written MeteorJS application to some versions using different MeteorJS boilerplate projects. And using those MeteorJS boilerplate projects lead me to discover MeteorKitchen.
Starting to see the big picture (again)
With MeteorKitchen I realized that I would not ever be writing pages of HTML and JavaScript to have good functionality in any app ever again. The problem with iterative web application development is that when you want to change something it means changing a lot of things in too many places. And the prototype application I was building had 25 "tables" with tens of "columns" of information. And they were mostly interconnected so making "joins" between them was more than often an issue. Either you had to build your application with a "table" named "customer" with a column named "name" or commit a refactoring of a massive scale. I've the numbers, but they're so boring I'll skip them here. Actually at the points of refactoring I changed the platform many times. Maybe to prevent me getting bored writing the same things again and again or just to actually find out if some other technology could work better.
With MeteorKitchen the prototype started to gain some speed and I could try a lot of different things. And no matter what the requirement was there'
s always a way to do it. MeteorKitchen has different options for advanced customization of your MeteorJS application. You can build your MeteorKitchen application using the Application Designer or simply by modifying the JSON-file that tells the MeteorKitchen generator what to do.
Ah, that's all for tonight. There's new version released of MeteorKitchen by Petar Korponaić - the creator of MeteorKitchen so go and build some apps!