Filipe Névola is the CEO of MeteorJS. He jumps in to discuss the changes and updates to Meteor over the last several years.

He explains what Meteor is, what its history is, and how it lands within the current JavaScript ecosystem. You can use it to build web and mobile apps and is a mature option to use for your applications.

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Special Guest: Filipe Névola.

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CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel, we have AJ O'Neill. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yo, yo, yo. Coming at you live from Pleasant, Pleasant Grove. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Steve Edwards. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Hardy from Portland. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Dan Shapir. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Hi from Hot and Sunny Tel Aviv. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Amy Knight. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Hey, hey from Nashville. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I'm Charles Max Wood from Top Ed Devs. And this week we have a special guest and that is Felipe Nevola. Felipe, do you want to introduce yourself? Let people know who you are and why you're famous. 

FILIFE_NEVOLA: Yeah, sure. I came from Brazil. My name is Felipe Nevola, but right now I am in Portland as well. So I am in the US, but I live in Brazil. And right now I am the CEO of Meteor.js and we are here to talk about Meteor.js. 

 

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DAN_SHAPPIR: That's really cool. Where in Brazil are you from? 

FILIFE_NEVOLA: I am from, originally I am from São Paulo, but now I'm living in the countryside. It's called Mato Grosso do Sul. And if you want to check a place there that is really famous in Mato Grosso do Sul, it's called Bonito. That's the same word for beautiful in Portuguese. And it's a beautiful place. So you should check it out, Bonito, and you should visit there sometime. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: For sure, I love Brazil. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. And yeah, you know, you said you're the CEO of Meteor and we're going to be talking about Meteor. We were talking before the show, and I think Dan rightly pointed this out, there are a lot of new people consistently coming into JavaScript. And I remember that Meteor kind of made it splash where people would have heard of it a few years back. So you want to just remind people or let people know what it is. And then we can kind of roll into maybe what's new since the last time we talked about it on this show. 

FILIFE_NEVOLA: Sure. Like Meteor is a full stack platform to build systems with JavaScript. So we support web development and we also mobile development. You can integrate Meteor with React Native or with Cordova. That's a choice that you can have. If you choose Cordova, we have a few tools that you can just like hit a few commands and you're ready to go. Like you have like a wrapper with the web view and everything works for you. So in my opinion now, like Meteor is a very good choice if you're trying to build a company because as we have like almost 10 years of like experience in development in M, so we have a lot of patches and a lot of features ready for you to use. So that's basically what Meteor is, like it's a very nice way for you to start your JavaScript app. So you just like need to hit Meteor create, so you have your app running and you start to develop it and you can choose a bunch of frameworks to use with Meteor, like in the UI layer, you can use React, you can use Vue, you can use Svelte, or you can use Blaze, there you can talk a little bit about Blaze later. That was a framework that was created inside Meteor but right now you can use MITR with any UI framework. And we use Node in the server. So it's pretty standard JavaScript, but you just have some facilities for you. So we have some features that are ready to use. So you don't need to worry about like webpack or configurations of your build, like some pipelines. You don't need to worry about any of this. Meteor just delivers everything for you in a single package. And it's always working. And we have more control because we have like a specific version of Node. So we know our packs are working there. So we have a little bit of more controlled environment with Meteor. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So you said a couple of things there, and at least, and I would like to unpack some of them. And to begin with, when people think about frameworks in JavaScript, what usually comes to mind is the MVC model, and recently more the view, the V because of React, et cetera, which kind of emphasized that part. But based on your description, it seems that Meteor is actually something else. So if you can explain exactly what is the role of Meteor, what does Meteor provide in the context of building a web application, if like you said, I'm actually going to use it with React or with Svelte or with some other framework for the actual V part of the MVC? 

FILIFE_NEVOLA: Yeah, that's a great question because even in surveys, when people put Meteor as a backend or as a frontend, it's hard to put Meteor in a single spot because Meteor does maybe too much. But what we do, when you create a project with Meteor, we connect your backend with your frontend for you. But you don't require that you use a specific frontend framework. So for example, when you create by default right now with Meteor, you have your React app running for you. But you can also use like dash dash view view, so you have your view app running for you. So we are basically like all the skeleton that you need to have an app. And Meteor is more than that, because we can split Meteor everything for you. So you can use the latest JavaScript, and you are sure it's going to work all the time because we have the same node version in each specific version of Meteor. We have the same node version. So for sure it's going to work for you. So that's the first part. We have these tools to make your server to run in development mode, in production mode. We have all these tools for you to do that. And we also have the runtime environment where we have a few packages. You need to remember a little bit about the story here because Meteor, it was created like before NPM or kind of the same time of NPM. So we also support in EPM packages, but we also have what you call Atmosphere packages. That are packs that have some special features. So we can also use these packages in runtime. And that's really the magic of Meteor, because when you start a project with Meteor, you can already get a lot of packages that does, for example, authentication for you, that has web requests for you. So you don't need to do all this in all your applications.