[glesperance]

> We've added file-level JavaScript variable scoping. Variables declared with `var` at the outermost level of a JavaScript source file are now private to that file. Remove the `var` to share a value between files.

I think it is convenient to be able to declare global variables like that but perhaps there should be a way to monitor those ; in other words, it would be really convenient to have some form of alert system to notify you when a new global variable is created.

That way, globals created by mistakenly forgetting the 'var' keyword would be easily spotted.

[glasser]

This is under active development on the linker branch: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/linker ! The goal, hopefully coming in one of the next few releases, is to provide package-scoped variables and explicit exports from packages, so that you don't need to rely on globals at all any more.

[bmcmahen]

I'm happy to hear this. One of the primary problems with client-side development right now is the lack of commonjs style imports and exports -- something which people are trying to solve using component, etc. It'd be nice if Meteor had something baked in.

[scottrblock]

Seems like a good idea to add outside of meteor projects too. Maybe an extension for Chrome dev tools that lists global variables loaded per page?

[wavesounds]

This will give you a list of globals in browser

for(var i in window){ if(typeof window[i]=="object"){console.log(i);} }

But I think op wanted variables server side as well

[glesperance]

I think it would be good to have that on both the client and the server.

Also, as simple as this might be, making it a de-facto standard (on meteor) would be a good thing since it would be a tool that we can count on, all the time. There are too many browsers IMO to make an extension a viable option.

Whitelisting variables would be good as well ; that way we do not get alerted if it is something we expect to be global.

[wavesounds]

Create a collection called MyVars and add this to your Server.js file:

Meteor.setInterval(function(){ for(var i in global){ if(MyVars.find({name:i}).count()==0){ MyVars.insert({name:i}); console.log("New Public Variable: ", i); } } }, 5000);

Thanks for the fun challenge :-)

[jmandzik]

Alert system if you're running Canary with experimental JS flag on:

Object.observe(window, function(changes){ console.log(changes) })

:)