One of the new features of Meteors is Blaze a next-generation live templating engine. The Meteor developers encourage everyone to take the 0.8.0 update as soon as possible with:
meteor update
And then list:
meteor list
To see what its new components are.
Blaze supersedes Spark with Meteor 0.8.0
Blaze is supersedes Spark and will be included from now on. Blaze will transform older HTML templates into live and reactive updating DOM elements. Blaze turns HTML templates into live updating DOM elements. Meaning, if the client ships or receives new data over the network that a template depends on, Blaze updates your screen automatically. Blaze uses a different architecture from Spark that improves on it in several ways.
Blaze designed to be developer-friendly
Like everything else in Meteor, Blaze is designed to be developer-friendly. You just write normal looking HTML templates and helpers. You don’t have to declare any dependencies or write code to manage how the screen updates it and all happens as Meteor anticipates it – automatic.
Blaze comes in two parts
Blaze consists of two parts: a build-time compiler transforms your templates into JavaScript code intermediate representation of those templates. Blaze ships a Handlebars-style compiler with Meteor 0.8.0. The other part is is a runtime API that renders elements and updates them through their complete lifecycle as those local elements and their dependencies change. Developers can use both tools independently in order to access the API directly. Blaze is renders not only HTML, instead it also works with SVG which makes it a perfect fit for a dynamic user experience. All its current changes to its predecessor are documented here: Wiki
- Blaze parses
.htmlfiles in your app and identifies the templates and body content (bundle-time). - It converts both the templates and body content with Spacebars and generates a client-side JavaScript file (bundle-time).
- The client initializes the templates and registers the body content (client).
- It renders the body and inserts it into the DOM (client).
- It renders templates (client).
- It renders all the individual components inside each template (e.g., “each”, “if” and nested templates) (client).
Source: http://meteorhacks.com/how-blaze-works.html
For Meteor’s developers
It’s quite important for Meteor developers that you understand why they decided to go with Blaze and it is better this way. The rendered code is called only on each new render of a list element. So if a new item is added reactively, the code isn’t re run for the entire list again. Using the
this.$()
also limits our search to just within the template, so is much faster too. Ever since tones of apps update a few pieces of data at a time, this approach is more efficient than Meteor’s older Spark version and will increase the amount of new and innovative web apps!
What is Meteor
Meteor is a JavaScript platform build to reduce costs and increase the reuse of software modules in future projects. With Meteor you develop web applications with a single language from the database to the server to all clients while placing emphasis on updating all data in real time over all clients simultaneously. Facebook and Twitter are using those techniques but never released an open source solution to the public. Meteor is highly scalable and can be applied for all applications where loads of data and application reactivity (real-time) evokes value proposition for innovative services. The original source code is available on GitHub and supplied under the MIT license agreement.
To be continued!!!! Subscribe so that I can update you asap!
Here is the origin of the article in German:http://www.heise.de/developer/meldung/Meteor-0-8-0-bekommt-neue-Templating-Engine-2156757.html
Here is the Blaze Notes on Meteorpedia: http://meteorpedia.com/read/Blaze_Notes