Meteor Best Practices

Hey, fellow Meteor developer!
Welcome to this humble place of Meteor knowledge 😊

This Guide is intended to help Meteor developers share their best practices for building most efficient and robust Meteor applications. Information provided here comes from Meteor experts and is proven by positive usage experience in the Meteor community.
Please note that some of the techniques may prove hard to grasp for Meteor beginners and moderate experience with Meteor is advised.

Since an official Meteor Guide has been [announced][1], we should all be contributing to it from now on. [1]: https://forums.meteor.com/t/new-mdg-project-the-meteor-guide/10873

##Development

• [] Describe updating to new version

##Application Design

• Choosing application structure
  Meteor doesn't enforce strict app structure, thus developer is free to make his own choice. In the screencast below you can learn about most common patterns for structuring your app.
  Watch: Project Structures & Load Order by @ManuelDeLeon
• Describe Component Design

##Data Management

• Describe Indexes
• Retrieving data from a 3rd party API or other non-Mongo source
  By default, data in publications come from MongoDB, but you can also publish data from other sources by using a Client-only collection and this.added call of the publication.
  This solution also makes your data static (as there is no Server collection present), i.e. there are no reactive changes on the Client when data change in the datasource.
  Read: Publishing anything by @dburles
• Using RoboMongo to easily manage your MongoDB data
  RoboMongo offers a nice GUI to access both your local and remote databases.
  Read: How to access MongoDB on Meteor via Robomongo in 3 Steps! by @katopz

##Performance

• Describe FastRender
• Describe SubsManager
• Describe Using Static Data
  This can help you save server overhead (for maintaining reactive connection to [hopefully:wink:] thousands of clients) if you publish to your page static data that shouldn't change during single user-session.
  One way is to use this.added described in Retrieving data from a 3rd party API
  The other - through meteor methods
  The other - through FastRender injection: subscribe through FastRender, don't subscribe through Meteor.subscribe
  http://projectricochet.com/blog/meteor-js-performance

Security

• Add Josh Owen's Security Checklist if he grants permission.

Scaling

• Describe capacity scaling
• Describe geographical scaling

##Miscellaneous

• Add ref to https://github.com/oortcloud/unofficial-meteor-faq

##Hacks :warning: naturally not best practices, but may prove useful😉

• Describe Meteor._sleepForMs(time)
• Describe Blaze._globalHelpers['helper']()
• Describe T.__helpers.get('helper').call()
• Describe Meteor.defer()
• Describe Tracker.afterFlush()

Since those features are undocumented, their syntax may be modified or dropped altogether in the next update without any notice. Use at your own discretion