Meteor.js Leader board example and some initial thoughts

leaderboard.js

// Set up a collection to contain player information. On the server,
// it is backed by a MongoDB collection named "players."

Players = new Meteor.Collection("players");

if (Meteor.is_client) {
  Template.leaderboard.players = function () {
    return Players.find({}, {sort: {score: -1, name: 1}});
  };

  Template.leaderboard.selected_name = function () {
    var player = Players.findOne(Session.get("selected_player"));
    return player && player.name;
  };

  Template.player.selected = function () {
    return Session.equals("selected_player", this._id) ? "selected" : '';
  };

  Template.leaderboard.events = {
    'click input.inc': function () {
      Players.update(Session.get("selected_player"), {$inc: {score: 5}});
    }
  };

  Template.player.events = {
    'click': function () {
      Session.set("selected_player", this._id);
    }
  };
}

// On server startup, create some players if the database is empty.
if (Meteor.is_server) {
  Meteor.startup(function () {
    if (Players.find().count() === 0) {
      var names = ["Ada Lovelace",
                   "Grace Hopper",
                   "Marie Curie",
                   "Carl Friedrich Gauss",
                   "Nikola Tesla",
                   "Claude Shannon"];
      for (var i = 0; i < names.length; i++)
        Players.insert({name: names[i], score: Math.floor(Math.random()*10)*5});
    }
  });
}

1. No idea...
2. No idea...
3. No Idea... But this isn't rails or django. You have to think differently.
4. I don't think so, It really depends how they had their MongoDB setup. It was localhost, so I suspect they were running mongo locally. When they switched to Depoly, they no longer used the chrome console (if I recall correctly).

3. Rails and Django have no concept of this either. I'm not talking about page loads, I'm talking about pulling down a new JavaScript app dynamically without a page load.

A new JS App? Can you elaborate? I haven't seen that yet. I've basically tried every framework available for Node at this point.

1. snake_case is the preferred convention in every other modern, dynamic language that I know of. Unfortunately JavaScript decided on using the less-readable camelCase. Most of the meteor API looks like it uses camelCase, with the exception of a few items like is_client and is_server.
2. I'm not sure how meteor handles loading order.
3. They don't support this yet.
4. Meteor is still a prototype and proof of concept. The documentation mentions that they haven't built authentication engines into meteor yet. When that happens there will be proper permissions in place for DB actions. Until then, yes, the client has full database access.

@MichaelMartinez good example is a chat app in a sidebar or something. No sense downloading/initializing 500kb of JavaScript until the user actually wants to chat, then you fetch the chat app's assets and away you go.

@rpflorence They haven't secured the mongodb store yet. 0.3.x Give it some time. The base looks really good, however.

meteor apps are insecure by default during production. now you can type $"meteor remove insecure" prior to deployment to remove this rapid application development feature.