JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Use Meteor's hosted solution

 

You can use “meteor deploy myapp.meteor.com” in your project root directory to spin up your app in a development environment that’s maintained by the awesome folks at Meteor. It’s a simple process. The problem is that it is explicitly stated that this is not for Production apps and you don’t get multiple hosts. So pretty quickly, you’ll need to find a new solution once you go live.

Note: Meteor’s hosting platform Galaxy is coming to beta in the coming months. It’ll likely stay in beta for a while with a disclaimer that it’s not for Production apps. When it’s ready, it’s going to be glorious, but until then, you’ll have to find an alternative solution.

 

Use a node.js platform hosted solution

 

Use “demeteorizer” to bundle up your application as a standalone node app and deploy it to one of the several Node hosting platforms like Heroku, Nodejitsu, or Modulus. This will certainly work if you only need one server (dyno, servo, or whatever each person calls it). But once you need to scale beyond that, you’ll bump up against the fact that none of them offer sticky sessions in a way that your Meteor app needs.

Don’t let their marketing fool you. Some claim to offer sticky sessions. They are lying and when you run into problems and in the face of proof (an ip log showing the same visitor hitting multiple servers), they’ll shrug their shoulders and say, “we don’t know Meteor”.

 

Roll your own solution on the cloud platform of your choice

 

If none of this sounds attractive to you, then you do have another option. It’s the place we ended up at: we just rolled our own stack. And it was easier than you might think.

For those who haven’t heard of Meteor yet: it is a hip new Javascript platform for developing web apps. It’s quite an innovation compared to “traditional” web frameworks: you develop in a single codebase and the code almost magically works in both the browser and the server. The platform also synchronizes data automatically across all connected clients by using long polling, WebSockets etc. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Whatever the result will be, the Phusion Passenger application server will be around to help you simplify your deployments and keeping your systems running smoothly.

Phusion Passenger takes a lot of complexity out of deploying Meteor, and adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production. It also makes it administering Meteor apps much easier. It has already done this for Ruby, Python and Node.js and is being used by high-profile companies such as Apple, Pixar, New York Times, AirBnB, Juniper etc.

Here are some of the benefits that Phusion Passenger gives you...