CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsmeteorfrontendbackend
Marc Soler
Marc Soler

Reputation: 123

Meteor - Can I develop the back-end first, and after backend is done, develop front-end?

My team has developed an iOS and Android App for our project while we use node and socket.io for back-end. We want to move to meteor so we can have a front-end with Angular 2 easily connected with the back-end.

But we want to rewrite the back-end with Meteor so our Apps can use it. And after this create the front-end.

My question is easy, in Meteor front-end and back-end are done at the same time? Or can we first build the back-end and after this the front-end?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 390

Answers (1)

Michel Floyd
Michel Floyd

Reputation: 20246

Yes, this is possible although it would feel a bit awkward to an experienced Meteor developer.

The Meteor "back-end" exposes the following:

  • managed collections: these are the definitions of the mongodb collections that will be used by your app to persist data. Note that some of these can be private to the back end, i.e. not exposed to the front end at all.
  • publications: these are the filtered/projected "views" of the collection data that the back-end will share with the front end on request (the form of the request is a subscription). Published data is synchronized bidirectionally with the front end asynchronously over WebSocket. This is the magic of Meteor's DDP which IMO is Meteor's core innovation.
  • methods: these follow a more traditional request-response pattern. You can have as many of these as you want and each can accept any number of parameters including objects. Meteor can also do latency compensation for methods which means that the method is first simulated on the client and the UI updated while waiting for the server to come back with an authoritative result. If the server result differs then the UI is patched up with the authoritative result. This makes database updates appear instantaneous to the user while providing eventual consistency.

If you like you can even build traditional REST endpoints with Meteor but then you would be missing out on the reactive sugar. These can of course be useful for other integrations however.

Like nodejs, Meteor encourages developers to tackle the full-stack. You're less likely to segregate developers into back-end and front-end functions which gives you a lot more flexibility.

Upvotes: 2

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