1. Introduction

1.1 Welcome to the Course

Hello, and welcome to building JavaScript websites with Meteor. My name is Craig Campbell. Meteor.JS is a full stack JavaScript framework for building interactive database driven websites, using nothing but html, css and JavaScript. In this course, I'm gonna give you an introductory tour to this powerful framework, and I'm gonna show you just how easy it can be to use this framework. So I wanna thank you so much for watching and we'll get started in the next lesson

2. Up and Running With Meteor

2.1 What Is Meteor?

Hello, and welcome back. In this lesson, I wanna talk very briefly about what Meteor is and what MongoDB is. Now, Meteor is a full stack open source JavaScript platform for creating web apps, and it allows us to create these web apps using nothing but JavaScript. Now, we'll obviously us a little HTML and CSS as well, but all of our coding from our front end to our back end is going to be done with JavaScript. And if you go to the Meteor website at meteor.com, you can get a lot of information about the Meteor platform. And one of the first things I like to locate any time I'm working with a new platform or framework is the documentation. So if we go to the website under the Developer's link, you'll see a drop down. And there's an option for documentation and that will take you to all the information you need for Meteor. Now, one of the great things about Meteor is it is reactive, which means that once we get Meteor up and running, we can see our changes to our website as we save our file. We don't have to refresh our browser, we don't have to upload to a server anywhere. We can see those changes immediately reflected in the browser whenever we make changes. Now by default, Meteor ships with a front end UI framework called Blaze. And we're gonna be using Blaze to create templates for our front end modules and this entire Blaze framework comes with Meteor. Now, another thing that comes with Meteor is MongoDB which is a document oriented database that's very easy to learn. And again, we can program everything from MongoDB using JavaScript. And all of our data which we will call documents in this course, all of our data will be stored in JSON objects, which makes it really easy to work with in JavaScript. Now, we're not gonna go very in depth on MongoDB in this course. We're really gonna focus mostly on Meteor. But I did wanna show you the MongoDB website. Again, that's on mongodb.com and the documentation for that is gonna be on your upper left hand corner. We see the docs link here and that will take you to all the documentation. So again, I just wanted to introduce you to Meteor and Mongo, and in the next lesson, we'll get started installing everything. So thank you for watching and I'll see you then.