Team Speed with Meteor and Agile Tools
Meteor would make a great platform to use as part of any teams software lifecycle toolkit. Ramping up is fast, and once ramped, development speed is very high.
In a typical development environment, many people writing tools to support the product lifecycle are operating up and down the stack. The environment is often chaotic, complex, and highly customized to the team
One of the things that makes the Meteor platform interesting is both front-end and back-end are implemented in JavaScript. The timing could not be better to engage with JavaScript, as the language continues to improve with ES6 features.
What interest me about Meteor, is working in the same language up and down the stack, will improve my productivity. My rhythm will be much smoother, not having to bounce back and forth between languages, frameworks and APIs.
Meteor is a full stack real-time application platform. It uses Node.js and MongoDB on the backend, and MiniMongo database in the browser. Meteor uses the DDP protocol to communicate between client and server, and the client is not limited to the browser. Command line clients such as node-ddp-client, are available. There are tons of contributors in the community, Meteor packages and Node.js packages
So how far to take this notion of full stack development in a single language?
Since this platform is using Node.js, we can go beyond the full stack of an application and create command line utils, that run standalone or interact with the Meteor real-time applications.
Is it worth considering a JavaScript infrastructure to be at the core of your product lifecycle stack implementation?
I think the time is definitely here. Not only has the JavaScript stack evolved rapidly over the past few years, the number of people that are coding in JavaScript is huge, it’s hard to deny the speed of development, and a big part of the Node community, is their mindset of granularity (keep things small and fast).
And lastly, JavaScript provides a vehicle to engage children thru the Khan Academy — what a great way to provide internships to kids and teenagers, helping us improve our software processes, while providing them with invaluable experience.
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