Meteor Components

Meteor Components is a simple, lightweight component extension for Meteor templates.

Quickstart

<template name="index">
  {{>Gravatar email="myemail@email.com"}}
</template>

<template name="Gravatar">
  <img src="{{gravatarUrl}}" />
</template>

// Show Gravatar avatar image.
// See: https://secure.gravatar.com/site/implement/hash/
// For a more in-depth look at the component API
// see https://github.com/dschnare/meteor-components/blob/master/client/index.js.
Component.Gravatar = {
  helpers: function () {
    return {
      gravatarUrl: function () {
        var email = this.data().email;
        if (email) {
          email = email.replace(/^\s|\s$/g, '');
          var hash = CryptoJS.MD5(email);
          return "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/" + hash;
        }
      }
    };
  }
};

Why

Why implement a package like this when Blaze Components exists that already does something similar?

• Blaze Components does too many things for a single package. Blaze Components introduces "namespaced" templates in addition to the component framework.

• Creating a Blaze Component doesn't feel like the Meteor way. Meteor Components tries to follow established Meteor idioms so if you know templates, you know components.

• Blaze Components overrides low-level, private methods deep in the Blaze templating layer. This exposes your code to a high degree of lock-in since a change in Meteor has a high likelihood of impacting Blaze Components so you won't be able to update Blaze Components without the risk of having conflicts with your version of Meteor.

• Blaze Components lacks a robust child-parent linking mechanism that detects child-parent relationships outside a template definition. Meteor Components resovles child-parent relationships when the components are first created so the child-parent relationships are always available to you.

Thank You

I'd like to thank the Blaze Components authors for providing a great framework and paving the way. Without Blaze Components as an example, Meteor Components would not be the way it is today.

But if you're looking for a similar Blaze Components framework with a smaller footprint and doesn't inject istself deep into the Blaze API then try Meteor Components.

Difference With Blaze Components

• Only keyword arguments are supported when including a component template.
• Components can be used interchangably as mixins.
• Elements with data-ref or ref attributes will be cached in this.refs.
• Helpers and event listeners are bound to the component instance.
• No manditory class hierarchy or base classes.
• Leverages the templating system without introducing new concepts that require low-level modification (i.e. keep Meteor the way it is).
• Plugins are used to extend the components while they are being instantiated. This makes it easy to augment components without a lengthy inheritence hierarchy.