Publications and Subscriptions

Meteor data transfer

Meteor is famous for its speed and reactivity of data, which is evident when a change is made and an application is updated instantly. This is as a result of its DDP.

The server publishes the data that’s subscribed to by the client. Meteor applications consist of two data stores, as illustrated in the diagram below:

Publication

A publication is a named API on the server and sends data to the client through DDP. Publications server-only function that accepts two arguments. The first argument is the name of the publication, which must be a unique string, while the second argument is a function that’s called on the server each time a client subscribes to that publication.

Assuming we have a Mongo collection in Meteor referred to as Students, we can create a publication that returns a subset of data to the client, like this:

//called only on the server
Meteor.publish("student.listBoys",function() {
   return Students.find({sex: "male"})
});

The code snippets above create a publication called ...