#smart package

The initial goal was to enable someone to add rooms / lobby / queueing / messaging to their app with a few lines of code. I got this idea from how Meteor implements user auth / registration in their apps. Here's how they do it:

{{ loginButtons }}

Yep. That's it.

The above is (basically) how you add user auth to your app. Given the fact that a dev may not want to show the lobby, or allow people to create rooms (they handle it on the back end), I figured I'd need to offer a little more control for what they show.

With those constraints, the following was my objective for an interface:

{{#if currentUser}} {{ createRoomControls }} {{ roomsList }} {{> room }} {{/if}}

Custom Views with Handlebar Helpers

Since the templates needed to be modular - I couldn't rely on just using the regular syntax of Template.[templateName].[helperFunction].

Instead I created my own - and I'm glad I did. For example, here's the bit of code backing the {{ roomsList }} template:

Handlebars.registerHelper('roomsList', function(){ var roomsInList = Rooms.find({}).fetch(); var res = '<div class="roomList">'; for (var i = 0; i < roomsInList.length; i++) { res = res + '<div class="listedRoom">' + '<span class="listedRoomName">' + roomsInList[i].name + '</span>' + '<span class="listedRoomCount">' + roomsInList[i].users.length + ' user(s)' + '</span>' + '<button id="' + roomsInList[i]._id + '" class="button joinRoom">' + 'Join' + '</button>' + '</div>'; } res = res + '</div>'; return new Handlebars.SafeString(res); });

Using Heartbeats

Another issue I ran into was removing users from the system when they closed the browser window without explicitly leaving their room.

The solution I used was a heartbeat timer. In essence, when someone entered a room I'd have the client start pinging the server at a heartbeat interval. When the ping stopped, and the time on the server passed a certain point, I removed the user and assumed they'd left.

How to Create & Test

The best reource I found when creating my package was Tyler Johnson's blog post on the topic.

Also, the README for my smart package walks you through how to set up a Meteorite-managed application.

Unexpected Issues

Surprisingly, some of the largest challenges I faced came when pushing updates to the package on Atmosphere. After the initial release, I fixed a few bugs and went to update things. But after several hours and trying everything I (and Google) could think of, my update still wasn't pushing.