Chapter 2. Developing and Testing an Advanced Application

The popularity of frameworks such as Ruby On Rails is because of two reasons. One is the ecosystem where one can find plugins and utilities to solve common problems and other is the scaffolding. MeteorJS has also earned countless contributors, which ultimately created a wonderful ecosystem. Also, as an added advantage, developers can use the Node.js ecosystem. Developers can find a lot of useful MeteorJS packages in the MeteorJS ecosystem, which is called atmosphere. Visit atmosphere (https://atmospherejs.com/) once and check the enormous amount of packages available for development.

Scaffolding enables anyone to kick-start a big application in minutes. Frameworks such as Ruby On Rails, YII, and Zend have mature scaffolding, which helps anyone with less knowledge about the framework to get started easily. Scaffolding reduces a lot of work and, therefore, developers can use their precious time in developing the application logic rather than spending time on less logical work, such as creating and managing the views, collections, and routes. Although there is no in-built scaffolding in MeteorJS, there are tools that can help to scaffold your applications.

Moreover, if you have worked with any of the previously mentioned frameworks or even with Backbone.js, and Ember.js, you will find that there is a separate entity called Model; you define the proper structure that is very similar to or the same as the columns in the database. The important reason behind this is maintainability. It gives a proper shape to the data so that it can be referenced without any chaos in the future. In MeteorJS, we have no built-in way to structure the data. However, there are packages that will help us to define the schema, validate the data before insertion, perform type checking, and define authorization rules to perform database-level operations.

Precisely, in this chapter, we will learn the following by redoing the same application from the previous chapter:

• Scaffolding in MeteorJS
• Collections and schema management
• Securing database operations at schema level
• Form creation and validation based on schema
• Debugging the application
• Testing the MeteorJS application