DZone
Web Dev Zone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
  • Refcardz
  • Trend Reports
  • Webinars
  • Zones
  • |
    • Agile
    • AI
    • Big Data
    • Cloud
    • Database
    • DevOps
    • Integration
    • IoT
    • Java
    • Microservices
    • Open Source
    • Performance
    • Security
    • Web Dev
DZone > Web Dev Zone > Meteor 1.3.3 Has Landed

Meteor 1.3.3 Has Landed

A new Meteor update is here offering DDP batching, .babelrc support, and improved import declarations. Read on for more information

Ben Newman user avatar by
Ben Newman
·
Jun. 16, 16 · Web Dev Zone · News
Like (3)
Save
Tweet
2.10K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free
As Meteor looks to the future, we must also refine and solidify the technologies we currently support. In that spirit, Meteor 1.3.3 is packed with changes aimed at improving the day-to-day experience of existing Meteor developers, while also ensuring Meteor remains approachable for new developers.

To begin using Meteor 1.3.3 now, run meteor update to upgrade existing apps, or visit the install page if you’re just getting started with Meteor.

An Awesome Community

Many of the improvements in Meteor 1.3.3 were driven and implemented by members of the community. For example, DDP update callbacks are now batched on the client side, leading to better performance when the server pushes lots of updates in quick succession, thanks to the efforts of Mitar Milutinovic and Nathan Muir.

Just as importantly, we've been getting much-needed assistance from the community when it comes to triaging and diagnosing GitHub issues. If you've reported an issue recently, chances are you've heard from Jesse Rosenberger, Wexpo Lyu, or Loren Sands-Ramshaw, to name just a few contributors who have stepped up to make our feedback systems work better for everyone involved.

Notable Changes

Though not every change in Meteor 1.3.3 bears mentioning in this blog post, we'd like to call out two changes that everyone updating to Meteor 1.3.3 ought to know about.

First, while Meteor still provides a solid core of recommended ECMAScript features, we now also support .babelrc configuration files, so that you can alter the set of Babel plugins run by the ecmascript compiler plugin. I'm happy to say this feature was initially prototyped and later reviewed by a community member named Gadi Cohen. A note about upgrading: if your project happens to contain existing .babelrc files that were previously ignored by Meteor, you should double-check that their contents are appropriate for your Meteor code as you update to 1.3.3.

Second, Meteor's implementation of ECMAScript 2015 import declarations has improved in several ways since Meteor 1.3.2.4, thanks to a new syntax transformer called reify. Now, when you write:

import { Template } from 'meteor/templating';
import { ReactiveVar } from 'meteor/reactive-var';

Template.hello.onCreated(function helloOnCreated() {
  this.counter = new ReactiveVar(0);
});

The compiled code will use normal variables for Template and ReactiveVar, so that when you're debugging you no longer have to deal with rewritten variable references like _templating.Template or _reactiveVar.ReactiveVar, and import declarations will work as expected in meteor shell.

The new modules transform also allows nesting import declarations inside conditional blocks and functions, which means you can write:


if (Meteor.isServer) {
  import { name, version } from "./server/config.json";
  console.log(name + "@" + version);
}

Instead of falling back to the require function. Note: in Meteor 1.3.3, this new compilation strategy is enabled by default for application code, but not yet enabled for Meteor package code. Modules in Meteor packages will continue to work exactly as they did in Meteor 1.3.2.4, so that Meteor package authors can easily publish their packages for pre-1.3.3 apps.

What's Next

Meteor 1.3.3 is the last version of Meteor that will ship with Node 0.10.x (specifically, 0.10.45) and Mongo 2.6. Meteor 1.4 will come with Node 4.4.x and Mongo 3.2, and it will be significantly easier to use the latest versions of Meteor packages or to try using a more recent version of Node, if you're feeling bold.

These changes have already been implemented, are passing tests, and are (almost) ready for your feedback. Now that 1.3.3 is out, the beta process for Meteor 1.4 will begin later this week. Though we considered skipping 1.3.3 and jumping directly to Meteor 1.4, we felt the upgrade path would be smoothest if Meteor developers had a stepping stone between 1.3.2.4 and 1.4.

How to Update

To update to Meteor 1.3.3, simply run meteor update in any Meteor application directory. By the way—since we hear this question frequently—if you ever want to see a complete list of official Meteor releases, just run the command meteor show METEOR.

If you encounter bugs, please report them on GitHub. There's a good chance we'll fix them first in Meteor 1.4, but of course, any significant fixes will be backported to a 1.3.3.x release.

Now go forth and meteor update!

Meteor (web framework)

Published at DZone with permission of Ben Newman, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Popular on DZone

  • How to Build Security for Your SaaS User Communications
  • Which JVM Version Is the Fastest?
  • How to Make Git Forget a Tracked File Now in .gitignore
  • Major PostgreSQL Features You Should Know About

Comments

Web Dev Partner Resources

X

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Careers
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • MVB Program
  • Become a Contributor
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 600 Park Offices Drive
  • Suite 300
  • Durham, NC 27709
  • support@dzone.com
  • +1 (919) 678-0300

Let's be friends:

DZone.com is powered by 

AnswerHub logo