Why Meteor?¶

For many years, web programming has been a drag. Developers used Javascript on the client, and a different language on the server. Moreover, when these different languages communicated via AJAX for dynamic pages, good software abstractions usually went out the window, resulting in things like jQuery spaghetti and therefore buggy apps.

What is a researcher to do, then, when most social science experiments actually aren’t social (since they study individuals), and to actually do social experiments requires continual real-time interaction between large numbers of participants? Meteor is at the forefront of a new generation of web technologies aimed at tidying up the mess describe above, and can simplify building social experiments significantly. As of now (June 2016) it is the most popular web framework on Github, with an active community and extensive documentation, and therefore great staying power.

Meteor’s development paradigm is significantly different from almost all other web frameworks, which generally focus on either the front-end or back-end. It is full-stack from the ground up, using one language (Javascript), where the server-side code runs on Node.js and the client-side runs in the browser. UI code is mostly written declaratively rather than imperatively: instead of saying how you want to do something, you just write what you want to do. Most importantly, the core of Meteor is a distributed data framework (which the declarative style hooks into) that greatly simplifies synchronizing state between multiple clients and a server. This is another level of abstraction over AJAX: instead of worrying about passing messages or calling remote procedures, you can just specify the data that needs to be shared and it will be updated, in real time, transparently. As a result, this can be an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of code (and complexity) for a real-time or collaborative app. As one article put it, Meteor has made MVC obsolete. When leveraging front-end frameworks such as Twitter’s Bootstrap that integrate well with Meteor, we can also get started with much less custom CSS.

Meteor has many useful features, but the following are primarily useful for researchers using web apps to study social behavior.

Easy development and fast prototyping. Meteor is a one-stop shop for setting up development for a web app, pulling in dependencies automatically. It runs a local server that updates in real-time as you code. This is very useful for testing new research ideas and designs before committing to a running things at large scale.
Real-time data synchronization. Meteor has powerful primitives for synchronizing data across multiple clients, making social, collaborative apps almost as easy to build as single-user apps. This makes studying social interactions much easier.
Fast and easy deployment. Deploying a Meteor app to a public server is as easy as one command. Getting an app accessible to the general public is often a lot of work for those unfamiliar with devops, and ease of deployment means you can get on with your research.
Active and growing community of developers. Meteor is one of the top 10 frameworks on GitHub, and is built on the widely popular NodeJS. Building an app with TurkServer leverages these communities as much as possible. Thus, you can find answers to many common issues on sites like StackOverflow and Meteor’s forums.

TurkServer is designed as a package (add-on) for Meteor, taking a Meteor app and plugging it into MTurk. The advantage of this approach is that it leverages the many examples of web apps built in Meteor and Javascript, even those not specific to social experiments, without depending on much proprietary functionality. Moreover, being able to contribute full-stack code makes components such as a waiting room, chat, and other common paradigms much easier to share. The future of online experiments is coming, and the next generation of web technologies is a great force multiplier for getting things done!

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