workflow and tools for meteor

Question

I'm about to start digging into Meteor for real (instead of just reading about it). I'm a near-complete noob but I've at least determined I'm going to use Sublime Text as my editor vs webstorm. I know I need a git account (going Bitbucket there). What else?

Are yeoman, grunt, and bower, (and lineman?) which seem like the workflow tools of the day, also necessary for writing a non-trivial app? It seems like Meteor already does a lot of the main functionality of these tools.

Do I need a testing suite like Jasmine (at least to get started?)

Anything else I'm missing? I just want to get everything I need (yes, including a couple good Javascript books) before I start.

Answer 1

You'll need the basic elements you already have (node, npm, git and ruby). You seem to know a little bit about web apps so I'll try analogies.

Yeoman essential purpose is to scaffold, meteor will do a really basic scaffolding for you. If you want to have a more advanced scaffold tool I encourage you to try em : https://github.com/EventedMind/em by Chris matter.

Grunt basic tasks equivalents are handled by the meteor commands (server, livereload, build, deploy...)

Bower is a package manager, I highly encourage you to use meteorite and its repo atmosphere (https://atmospherejs.com/) as your package manager. Actually, meteorite commands (mrt) are going to replace meteor commands in your projects. Eventually, atmosphere and meteorite are going to be fold into the core of meteor. (see meteor roadmap : https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap)

(note that you can use npm packages to)

All the essential functionalities of Lineman are handled by meteor.

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However, some tasks are NOT handled by meteor.

• I run the classic compass watch on my sass folder.
• A good testing framework for meteor is Laika : http://arunoda.github.io/laika/

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To start, you can go to discover meteor : https://www.discovermeteor.com/. For more advanced learning; go to evented mind : https://www.eventedmind.com/

The first thing you want to learn is how to handle iron-router

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EDIT

There is now two major resources to start : https://guide.meteor.com/ https://themeteorchef.com/

Iron router has been replaced by flow router ; there is a guide to use it : https://kadira.io/academy/meteor-routing-guide

To manage scss : https://atmospherejs.com/fourseven/scss

The view layer : React replaced Blaze