So for a weekend project I’ve decided to work on a site that makes conference schedules across languages, platforms, and countries easily available.

I decided to use MeteorJS for this project, a relatively young web framework that really puts the “shared” in “shared back end and front end codebase”.

While I have known about MeteorJS for a while, the last time I looked at them they were 0.x software, so although the demos had lots of interesting functionality, I wasn’t quite ready to take the dive (at that time, I think I was till kicking the tires on Knockout, and AngularJS).

Well, I do have time now, and there are some patterns I have been finding for doing things that others might find useful that I’d love to share:

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Testing

The team at Meteor have done some work to allow flexibility in testing in the way of not trying to munge/process anything in the “tests/” folder. Thanks to that, while hacky, you can create an NPM package which holds JUST the tests for the project, and use NPM/nodejs freely inside that folder.

To make this possible I created a barebones package.json with `npm init`, and went ahead adding my dependencies.

Also, I installed the NPM package that meteor provides, which enables you to use NPM in your meteor app.

At this point, most of the tests I am writing are integration tests, as a whole slew of tests become unnecessary, with how much work Meteor does for you.

While these are just some patterns I have adopted while developing, they’re not sanctioned/approved by the Meteor team, so use them with caution. While I hope I’m not abusing Meteor too much, it’s very possible that I am, so use these patterns at your own risk!