Version 1.4 of Meteor has been released, with major updates to Node and MongoDB.
Zoltan Olah, Meteor's director of customer success, said the release "focuses on long term stability for the platform, continues our work to align Meteor with the wider JavaScript ecosystem, and positions us to work closer with the community than ever before."
One of the biggest changes in Meteor 1.4 is a significant upgrade to Node, updating from 0.10.46 to version 4.4.7. Node 4.0 was released in September 2015, when it was combined with io.js into one single codebase. The Long-Term Support plan means that the 4.0 version series will be actively maintained until April 2018, and Olah says Meteor plans to update to Node 6 later this year.
Significantly for the 1.4 release, Meteor has also updated how it handles binary package builds. Instead of including in packages pre-compiled binary npm dependencies, hard-coded to specific Node versions, the release moves the build step to the package user -- meaning that developers are responsible for installing a computer toolchain on their machines, but package authors don't need to build packages for each target architecture.
Olah said the Meteor team has been been working with key contributors, and that relaxed core package version constraints in 1.4 have led to substantial updates, including blaze and livedata.
MongoDB has been updated in Meteor's major release to version 3.2.6. Olah says:
The development database for new apps will now default to using the WiredTiger storage engine; however, you can still connect to databases running the old MMAPv1 engine. You can now also pass additional connection options to the Mongo driver by calling
Mongo.setConnectionOptions(options), which allows configuring certificates for SSL encryption, for example.
Developers should update their database by following the instructions at https://docs.mongodb.com/v3.0/release-notes/3.0-upgrade/ and in development, can use meteor reset to remove the old database, letting Meteor create a new WiredTiger database.
Now that 1.4 is live, next on the Meteor roadmap is 1.4.1. Following 1.4's changes to package constraints, Olah says that Meteor’s worldwide community will now be able to make "substantial updates" to core packages, while Meteor 1.5 is set to bring much-anticipated SQL support, via Meteor's GraphQL-based data stack Apollo.
A full list of changes, including packaging-related changes, can be viewed here.