Meteor is definitely the most difficult thing we’ve gone over in class so far as it had a very steep learning curve. Though it still made use of our knowledge gained thus far, the concepts behind Meteor and client-server applications were still fairly difficult to grasp. Even with the difficulties, Meteor still turned out to be a cool application as we hadn’t seen the client and server working synchronously where both sides experience the same changes at the same time without needing to refresh. This proved to be very convenient when debugging or testing out features as you could see the changes updated automatically. It was also pretty cool being able to use terminal to use as a debugging tool as it gives pertinent information when rebuilding the application after an update.
As for first impressions, Meteor does not do too well as it takes a while to set up before the more interesting parts happen. At the moment I feel that I am still climbing the learning curve as I still do not know much about the inner workings of Meteor and don’t have a perfect image of how everything is connected in Meteor. However, with more time and practice I hope to make use of Meteor in the future as it is a very modern application that I can see being a standardized application to use as it seems more efficient and convenient compared to older internet-based applications.
Personally, Meteor didn’t seem to have anything that was easy besides initializing the application after getting everything set up. Using Meteor along with ESLint proved to be fairly helpful as it forced you to keep everything organized, which was helpful as code could get cluttered and difficult to track, but did have its moments where it seemed like a hassle to deal with. Debugging seemed to be made easier as Meteor would tell you why the application failed to build by showing you the path that failed to build. Despite being fairly difficult to learn, Meteor does ultimately do its best to make things easier for the user.
In conclusion, Meteor is a useful and cool application that reflects the way modern web applications should be built by establishing a direct connection between the server and client. The early stages of learning Meteor can be difficult, but with time the benefits of Meteor will become more prominent and the overall convenience and efficiency of Meteor will outshadow the learning curve that a user has to go through.