Use RethinkDB with LoopBack and Meteor

Now that RethinkDB is ready for adoption in production environments, a growing number of developers are working to integrate it with their favorite backend frameworks. We’ve seen several particularly promising integrations emerge over the past few weeks.

Meteor integration

Meteor developer Slava Kim published a video on YouTube that demonstrates his proof-of-concept bridge between Meteor and RethinkDB. Meteor is a full-stack JavaScript framework for realtime application development. One of Meteor’s key features is that it gives developers uniform methods for querying data on both the client and server.

Slava’s Meteor integration includes a client-side cache that users can access with conventional ReQL queries–derived from RethinkDB contributor Michel Tu’s ReQLite project. You can see a sample application built with Slava’s bridge on GitHub. The Meteor integration is still at an early stage of development, but it’s off to a very promising start.

LoopBack with RethinkDB

StrongLoop published a blog post that describes how to use RethinkDB with LoopBack, their popular Node.js backend framework. LoopBack makes it easy to build an API backend without implementing the endpoints by hand. It automatically transforms simple data model definitions into a restful API with standard CRUD operations.

In the blog post, StrongLoop shows how users can quickly build an API backend with LoopBack and RethinkDB. The post also demonstrates how to use RethinkDB changefeeds to add realtime capabilities to a LoopBack application. The demonstration in the blog post uses developer Dmitry Gorbunov’s RethinkDB connector for LoopBack.

Install RethinkDB to try out the new Meteor and LoopBack integrations.