What killed the ICS 314 Student? Meteor!

26 Oct 2017

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For the past few weeks we have been using Meteor, which is, according to Professor Johnson, “an example of a modern, internet-based, client-server application architecture.” When the semester started, a laptop hardware requirement was provided. One thing that caught my attention was the requirement for 16 GB of RAM, which was ludicrous to me, since my gaming PC at home has that much RAM. However, once we starting using Meteor and IntelliJ, I understood the reason why. These applications are extremely memory intensive, and having 16 GB of RAM helps aleviate a lot of the time needed to build our applications when constantly testing and debugging them. The initial set-up of Meteor was somewhat difficult. Even with the steps provided to us, there were many issues that I encountered, such as my applications not building, not refreshing properly when changes were made in IntelliJ, or having extremely long loading times. After consulting the Meteor troubleshooting tips that were provided, and some trial and error, Meteor currently has not given me any issues and runs very smoothly.

Meteor has made me much more comfortable with Powershell, as you need Command Line to execute Meteor. The feeling when you open localhost and see your application running properly is quite euphoric, and has made me appreciate Meteor and ease of use when developing applications. Meteor seems to be a very powerful application architecture that has been designed for modern platforms and devices. I think that if you can bear with the initial hiccups of configuring and setting up your environment properly, you will find Meteor to be an excellent choice for application design.