These three application prototypes were created with MeteorKitchen.
PIMS - a Product Information Management Software. Adds many-to-many support for MeteorKitchen collections. The application has 16 collections from product groups to product pictures. Product groups supports multi-level parent-children configuration. E.g. Products->Fruits and Berries->Berries->Red Berries etc. A product can belong to multiple product groups without any limitation implement with multi-select UI-component. MeteorKitchen version of this prototype was it’s 3rd incarnation.
Things learnt from building this prototype
- Using MeteorKitchen as application generator
- Multi-level parent children implementation in MongoDB with the needed UI elements to support it.
- Products-collection has 60 attributes. Displaying this many information elements has it’s challenges. Many of the attributes are many-to-one types and need their own management UIs.
- Uploading product images with automatic re-sizing. Saving the images to an online-storage / mongodb.
- Staged CSV import/export with user customizable schema. Dynamic schema support for imported CSV information.
PITPA - Personal Invoices Tracking and Payment Application. Is an application which manages and tracks due dates for invoices created from email bodies or PDF-attachments. It extracts invoice information from email and their attachments and displays it for the user.
Things learnt from building this prototype:
- GMail offline Oauth permission to automatically fetch email on behalf of the user
- Text extraction from free form emails.
- PDF text extraction.
- Number and date type handling and conversions
- Usage of the bootstrap HTML, CSS, and JS framework
- Building application log for a Meteor application for the user
Invoices - A simple invoices app with multi-company support. Generates PDF invoices for the user to download. Supports virtual and non-virtual bank payment bar-code graphics generation. Supports multiple languages.
Things learn from building this prototype:
- Usage of the semantic-ui development framework
- Currency and number information localisation
- BarCode graphics generation using JavaScript
- Multi-format, multi-language PDF generation using JavaScript
TLDR;
Using meteor-kitchen to build meteor apps is a nice way to prototype your ideas without having to write a lot of html/js code. And meteor-kitchen apps come out of the oven well baked. You can see and try the invoices app here http://laskut.meteor.com/. It comes with no warranties.
As a part of web application prototyping I made this small Google form http://goo.gl/forms/jrc1Dvjmt7 to gather information about what the application should be doing.
Later we’ll see ways to build Android and Apple app from a Meteor app.