actually, Meteor is not like Derby. For one, you don't need to deal with callbacks when data is changed. Meteor can automatically figure out what data sources are bound to certain containers in the template being rendered and when you make a change in the database, the data is pushed to all the clients. Here are some good details on the differences: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842525. Also, Meteor now has a REST package built-in https://github.com/crazytoad/meteor-collectionapi and additional modules that you can install, like https://github.com/tmeasday/meteor-router