Meteor is a very clever Node/JavaScript framework which I will admit to have been using in the recent past. It allows developers to create live updating, multiple screen apps without having to delve too much into the required magic of how the data gets from A to B,C and D - check out the screencasts and examples for a better idea. Now the developers have announced the latest update, version 0.6.5, which has added some very useful features that will make building larger, more complex applications easier. First new feature is a namespacing system which gives each module or package its own namespace and automagically wraps them to stop them clashing. This works in the server or browser and makes life easier of package writers who don’t need to worry about butting heads with other package writers.
Second highlight feature is the components of standard apps are now visible in the packaging systems as “standard-app-packages” and developers can remove them as needed. One example would be removing the web server so you can write lean command-line tools or daemons. Third up, full support for source maps which means that when there’s an error with say CoffeeScript code (which is turned into JavaScript and goes through various manipulations before it hits the browser or server), then the error will, using the source map, point to where it went wrong in the CoffeeScript source, not to the JavaScript code it became. Fourth feature on the list is simple support for server-side data files. Full details of these and the many other changes in the release notes. Meteor is open sourced under an MIT licence.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog