How Meteor works, Client vs Server?

Question

I am really confused at to how Meteor works. I know there's a server side where you just install it using the terminal. But what about the client? Does the client need to install anything? For example, clients need to install Adobe Flash to run Flash. Are we talking about the same thing here? Or can the client just access it through a regular page without installing anything.

Thanks for the clarification. <3 StackOverflow

Answer 1

I am assuming you mean the Meteor Http Server? In this case, you can think of it as being very similar to SignalR or node.js. Basically javascript on the client handles receiving events that come back from the server, so you will generally need to include a script on the client side.

You may want to read the following links for more information.

http://meteorserver.org/browser-techniques/

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AsynchronousScalableWebApplicationsWithRealtimePersistentLongrunningConnectionsWithSignalR.aspx

Answer 2

Meteor is a pure javascript web-application framework.

All you need to run meteor is a JavaScript environment.

Server-side, NodeJS is the gold standard javascript environment.

Client-side, all you need is a browser that supports javascript.

There are no plugins required or other magic at work. It's just javascript.

Answer 3

I think the question refers to http://meteor.com, and if that is the case the client does not need to install anything.

Meteor is a framework for writing Javascript applications, and as such all modern browsers support it "out of the box". The initial request for a web site will download the HTML, CSS and Javascript and it will run just as any other web application like GMail, etc.

You can check out a series of example applications at http://madewith.meteor.com and you should be able to run them without adding any plugins, etc.