Using Meteor for Real Time Geospatial Data

Using Meteor for Real Time Geospatial Data

Using Meteor for Real Time Geospatial DataThere is a lot of excitement right now in the web development world around pure language frameworks like “Meteor“. In case you haven’t heard, Meteor is a pure language JavaScript web application framework designed to allow developers to focus on functionality by shielding them from having to worry about things like integrating client-side and server-side code or generating/handling HTTP requests. Meteor is still in “preview” release, but their website suggests that this is primarily due to the lack of 100% code coverage and that the framework may be stable enough for many projects in it’s current state (plus it’s open source and well documented, so it can easily be modified if need be).

I wanted to get in on some of the fun, so I decided that I would try to create a quick map editing application. Within a couple hours I had a real time geospatial data editing demo up and running on Meteor’s cloud hosting: realtime-redlines.meteor.com

The demo is still very simple at the moment. Users can draw points, lines and polygons on the map (as well as clear all drawings) and these drawings show up in real time for other users. The cursors of other active users are also displayed on the map. My intention is to make a more practical collaborative mapping tool from this demo which will provide users with more robust map editing tools as well as a way to chat in real time while editing.

My experience with Meteor so far has been awesome. I find the framework to be a joy to use. It’s thrilling to see your code work on both the client and server. It takes nearly all of the headache out of web development and allows you to focus on what matters: building good applications. In addition to making development easy and fun, the way that Meteor automatically delivers real time data updates presents some pretty cool possibilities for web applications in general and web mapping applications in particular.

Expect to see more on this from me soon…

NOTE: I imagine that Meteor’s cloud hosting is not the most reliable location for hosting, so I will be moving the demo over to another host soon. However, Meteor’s cloud hosting is as easy to use as starting the server locally and is a great way to test and demo ideas.

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