Meteor, or MeteorJS, is a partly proprietary, mostly

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

isomorphic In mathematics, an isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping. Two mathematical structures are isomorphic if an isomorphism exists between them. The word is ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

web framework A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build and ...

written using

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code o ...

. Meteor allows for rapid prototyping and produces cross-platform ( Android,

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

) code. The server-side MongoDB program is the only proprietary component of Meteor and is part of the Meteor download bundle. It is possible to use Meteor without using the server-side MongoDB. It uses the

Distributed Data Protocol Meteor, or MeteorJS, is a partly proprietary, mostly free and open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework written using Node.js. Meteor allows for rapid prototyping and produces cross-platform ( Android, iOS, Web) code. The server-side M ...

and a

publish–subscribe pattern In software architecture, publish–subscribe is a messaging pattern where senders of messages, called publishers, do not program the messages to be sent directly to specific receivers, called subscribers, but instead categorize published me ...

to automatically propagate data changes to clients without requiring the developer to write any synchronization code. On the client, Meteor can be used with any popular front-end JS framework,

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React REACT or React may refer to: Science and technology *REACT (telescope), a telescope at Fenton Hill Observatory, New Mexico, US Computing * React (JavaScript library) , a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, from Facebook ** React Nati ...

Svelte Svelte is a free and open-source front end component framework or language created by Rich Harris and maintained by the Svelte core team members. Svelte is not a monolithic JavaScript library imported by applications: instead, Svelte compiles H ...

, Angular, or Blaze. Meteor is developed by ''Meteor Software''. The startup was incubated by

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...

and received $11.2M in funding from

Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Andreessen ...

in July 2012. Meteor raised an additional $20M in Series B funding from Matrix Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Trinity Ventures. It intends to become profitable by offering Galaxy, an enterprise-grade hosting environment for Meteor applications.

History

Having been in development for about eight months, Meteor was initially released in December 2011 under Skybreak. By April 2012, the framework was renamed Meteor and officially launched. During the next few months, and with the help of large investments from Andreessen Horowitz and endorsements from high-profile figures in the startup world, Meteor steadily increased its user base. It became more commonly used in production apps and websites. Particularly after receiving large amounts of

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

in its Series B funding round, Meteor acquired and integrated several other startups into its core product. Acquisitions have included FathomDB, a cloud database startup, Galaxy, a cloud platform for operating and managing Meteor applications, and Kadira, a performance monitoring solution. Meteor has successfully monetized its userbase: In 2016, Meteor beat its own revenue goals by 30% by offering web hosting for Meteor apps through Galaxy. From 2016 the Meteor Development Group (the open source organisation powering Meteor) started working on a new backend layer based on

GraphQL GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data. GraphQL was developed internally by Facebook (now Meta) in 2012 before being publicly released in 2015. On 7 Nov ...

to gradually replace their pub/sub system, largely isolated in the whole node.js ecosystem: the Apollo framework. In October 2019, the Meteor.js open source framework and Galaxy Hosting Products were purchased by Tiny Capital and renamed Meteor Software.

Distributed Data Protocol

Distributed Data Protocol (or DDP) is a client–server

protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technology ...

for querying and updating a server-side database and for synchronizing such updates among clients. It uses the publish–subscribe messaging pattern. It was created for use by the Meteor JavaScript framework. The DDP Specification is located on GitHub.

Books

* Coleman, Tom; Greif, Sacha – Discover Meteor (2014) * Hochhaus, Stephan; Schoebel, Manuel – Meteor in Action (2014) * Müns, Philipp – Auditing Meteor Applications (2016) * Strack, Isaac – Getting started with Meteor.js JavaScript framework (2012) * Susiripala, Arunoda – Bulletproof Meteor (2014) * Titarenco, David; Robinson, Josh; Gray, Aaron – Introducing Meteor (2015) * Susiripala, Arunoda – Meteor Explained – A Journey Into Meteor's Reactivity (2014) * Turnbull, David – Your First Meteor Application: A Complete Beginner's Guide to the Meteor JavaScript Framework (2014)

Packages and Tools

* InjectDetect – database injection attack detection * Vulcan.js – React/GraphQL stack built on top of Meteor * Apollo – GraphQL server with support for Meteor * Meteor React Native - Package to integrate with

React Native React Native is an open-source UI software framework created by Meta Platforms, Inc. It is used to develop applications for Android, Android TV, iOS, macOS, tvOS, Web, Windows and UWP by enabling developers to use the React framework along w ...

References

External links