Chapter 2. Reactive Programming…It's Alive!

As we learned in Chapter 1, Setup and Installation, Meteor operates on a reactive programming model. This means that your templates aren't only concerned with displaying data, but they are also listening for changes to that data so that they can "react" to those changes. These areas of data where the templates look for changes are called reactive contexts.

We will now start developing a Lending Library application, lay the framework for future chapters, and use Meteor's built-in reactive model to track and propagate changes to our application to all clients that are listening.

In this chapter, you will learn about:

• Creating your first real application
• Using reactive programming to track and automatically update changes
• Exploring and testing changes made to your data from multiple browser windows