Download Meteor 1.5

Meteor is an open source framework for JavaScript on the web. It uses Node.js and provides support, for example, for MongoDB for retrieving and storing data. For more information, we refer you to this page. The development team released version 1.5 of Meteor a few days ago with the following announcement:

Announcing Meteor 1.5

Today we’re thrilled to announce the release of Meteor 1.5, which has been more than four months in the making, with significant improvements around JavaScript bundle sizes and page load performance.

Meteor Changelog

• The meteor-base package implies a new dynamic-import package, which provides runtime support for the proposed ECMAScript dynamic import(…) syntax, enabling asynchronous module fetching or “code splitting.” If your app does not use the meteor-base package, you can use the package by simply running meteor add dynamic-import. See this blog post and PR #8327 for more information about how dynamic import(…) works in Meteor, and how to use it in your applications.
• The ecmascript-runtime package, which provides polyfills for various new ECMAScript runtime APIs and language features, has been split into ecmascript-runtime-client and ecmascript-runtime-server, to reflect the different needs of browsers versus Node 4. The client runtime now relies on the core-js library found in the node_modules directory of the application, rather than a private duplicate installed via Npm.depends. This is unlikely to be a disruptive change for most developers, since the babel-runtime npm package is expected to be installed, and core-js is a dependency of babel-runtime, so node_modules/core-js should already be present. If that’s not the case, just run meteor npm install –save core-js to install it.
• The npm npm package has been upgraded to version 4.6.1.
• The meteor-babel npm package has been upgraded to version 0.21.4, enabling the latest Reify compiler and the transform-class-properties plugin, among other improvements.
• The reify npm package has been upgraded to version 0.11.21, fixing issue #8595 and improving compilation and runtime performance.
  Note: With this version of Reify, import declarations are compiled to module.watch(require(id), …) instead of module.importSync(id, …) or the older module.import(id, … ). The behavior of the compiled code should be the same as before, but the details seemed different enough to warrant a note.
• The install npm package has been upgraded to version 0.10.1.
• The meteor-promise npm package has been upgraded to version 0.8.4.
• The uglify-js npm package has been upgraded to version 3.0.13, fixing #8704.
• If you’re using the standard-minifier-js Meteor package, as most Meteor developers do, it will now produce a detailed analysis of package and module sizes within your production .js bundle whenever you run meteor build or meteor run –production. These data are served by the application web server at the same URL as the minified .js bundle, except with a .stats.json file extension instead of .js. If you’re using a different minifier plugin, and would like to support similar functionality, refer to these commits for inspiration.
• To visualize the bundle size data produced by standard-minifier-js, run meteor add bundle-visualizer and then start your development server in production mode with meteor run –production. Be sure to remove the bundle-visualizer package before actually deploying your app, or the visualization will be displayed to your users.
• If you’ve been developing an app with multiple versions of Meteor, or testing with beta versions, and you haven’t recently run meteor reset, your .meteor/local/bundler-cache directory may have become quite large. This is just a friendly reminder that this directory is perfectly safe to delete, and Meteor will repopulate it with only the most recently cached bundles.
• Apps created with meteor create –bare now use the static-html package for processing .html files instead of blaze-html-templates, to avoid large unnecessary dependencies like the jquery package.
• Babel plugins now receive file paths without leading / characters, which should prevent confusion about whether the path should be treated as absolute. PR #8610
• It is now possible to override the Cordova iOS and/or Android compatibility version by setting the METEOR_CORDOVA_COMPAT_VERSION_IOS and/or METEOR_CORDOVA_COMPAT_VERSION_ANDROID environment variables. PR #8581
• Modules in node_modules directories will no longer automatically have access to the Buffer polyfill on the client, since that polyfill contributed more than 22KB of minified JavaScript to the client bundle, and was rarely used. If you really need the Buffer API on the client, you should now obtain it explicitly with require(“buffer”).Buffer. Issue #8645.
• Packages in node_modules directories are now considered non-portable (and thus may be automatically rebuilt for the current architecture), if their package.json files contain any of the following install hooks: install, preinstall, or postinstall. Previously, a package was considered non-portable only if it contained any .node binary modules. Issue #8225