By Marc Holmes

Meteor is ideal for building the kind of collaborative apps that are leading the current wave of web and mobile experiences. These are apps that demand ‘instant’ response times through reactive rendering and optimistic UI updating and great examples are project management apps such as Asana and chat apps such as Slack.

So how might you get started building your app? While our own ‘To Dos’ tutorial is a simple intro to Meteor and might be a trivial starter for someone who wants to build their own Asana(!), the community has been hard at work on projects building chat apps similar in style to Slack that are great to use, but also to explore and learn from. Here are some options:

Option 1: Start from Scratch

Daniel Li has written a 5-part series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) on his experiences building an open source chat app. You can get coding right away by following the series.

Option 2: SpaceTalk

SpaceTalk author @timbrandin gave a talk on this app at Meteor Devshop in SF just last week. Great work from the team.

If you want to grab the code and run SpaceTalk yourself, follow these simple steps:

Install Meteor if you haven’t already:

Clone the SpaceTalk repo:

Run the app:

cd SpaceTalk

meteor run --settings=settings.json

Deploy to meteor hosting:

meteor deploy <your_app_name>.meteor.com --settings=settings.json

Option 3: Rocket Chat

Similarly, Rocket Chat has a number of contributors lead by rodrigok and @gabriel_engel. It is based on the Slack user experience and — like SpaceTalk — you can easily build and deploy your own version.

Install Meteor if you haven’t already.

Clone the Rocket.Chat repo:

Run the app:

cd Rocket.Chat

meteor

Deploy to meteor hosting:

meteor deploy <your_app_name>.meteor.com

Option 4: nullchat

Finally, @mattfeldman has been working on nullchat for some time. As with the others, the code is available on Github and a roadmap is maintained on Trello if you’d like to contribute.

As with the others, you can clone the code and build and deploy your own version of nullchat.

Install Meteor if you haven’t already.

Clone the nullchat repo:

Run the app:

cd nullchat

meteor

Deploy to meteor hosting:

meteor deploy <your_app_name>.meteor.com

Thanks to Daniel, Matt, the SpaceTalk team, and the Rocket.Chat team for building great reference apps. If you have a great app you’d like us to highlight then please drop us a line.