Show HN: We're writing a book about Meteor (opens in new tab)

Seconding the PenFM suggestion. I know mike personally and have seen his work on the platform. It's very impressive. I don't think there's anything else out there that can so easily push out a perfectly-formatted ebook without all the usual pains involved.

What does Pen.fm do?

And we haven't really decided on this yet, I don't think we'll need to use LaTeX but we'll see. Any suggestions are welcome :)

As someone who has tooled around with Meteor a bit, and also digging into the other platforms (although I haven't messed with FlatIron yet, despite being a Nodejitsu customer/fan), I think Meteor has a huge sweet spot in the Enterprise world. It really does abstract a huge amount in a way that is very un-Node, but that has some great pros when it comes to time saving. It is unbelievable how quickly a professional app with authentication, bootstrap, email (integration with mailgun out of the box, or your own) can be built. A lot of times in my day job as a data analyst, I just need to quickly get a tool deployed for my team to work with, and I'm not trying to be "pure" and worry about being able to npm install the latest MongoDB to Postgres synchronization module, or something like it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited about where Rendr will go when they finally get it ready for prime time, and I'm trying to get more comfortable with Backbone in preparation for it. But the ease with which I was able to quickly build something in Meteor makes a stark contrast with what I'm having to do with Backbone/Express combo.

Jesus. Is it bad that I recognize exactly two of those proper nouns?

also sharejs.

Good god. I don't know how you poor bastards put up with that ridiculous nanny state firewall. Living in China must be like living with really strict parents.

It's hosted on Heroku, is Heroku blocked in China? 真奇怪…

Anyway here's a PDF version of the page:

http://cl.ly/MiTa

And you can sign up to the mailing list here:

http://sachagreif.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=b5af4...

yes. This is a curious decision.

Well, if you use websockets, you have to wire things together yourself. Sure, you might want to decide _exactly_ what data to send to each client, when to send it, how to propagate it between clients, how to deal with merging issues, etc at a message-by-message level, you want to get down to this level.

But there's probably a good chance that (unless you are doing something very specific) you'll just end up re-implementing the built in pub/sub mechanisms of meteor collections which usually give you exactly what you need with almost no work required.

To me, that's like asking "why use rails, why not just use HTTP?". We build on layers of abstraction.