The new Meteor 0.5.0 version — released Thursday– adds server-side authentication APIs and user account controls which should make it easier for developers to write more secure applications.

Meteor’s aim over all is to help developers write truly webscale enterprise applications faster and easier than before. Developers especially like Meteor’s ability to “push” hot code updates to users without interrupting the users’ work.

The beauty of Meteor’s framework overall is that it lets developers use the same APIs on the client and server side of the application divide, speeding actual development.

According to Meteor’s blog post, the new Meteor.allow API:

“controls which data a Meteor client is allowed to change in the database, and hooks that give the Meteor server control over what data it sends to each client. These core APIs operate at the wire protocol layer, so they establish a strong foundation for security.”

Also new is Meteor Accounts which is built atop the core Meteor authentication to provide higher-level APIs to manage user accounts.

Also new is support for the Secure Remote Password protocol which lets users securely log in to a server without having to send that server their unencrypted password.

In the past six months, San Francisco-based Meteor has built an impressive developer base which helped it raise $11.2 million in Series A funding in July. But as with any new tool set, there were gaps to be filled, and security was chief among developer concerns. A question posted to Stackoverflow summed them up.

“What is the time-frame for adding authentication and data validation to Meteor? This validation/authentication is vital for Meteor to be taken seriously for anything other than toy projects. Full write permissions for every client is obviously unacceptable for most (if not all) applications.”

It sounds like Meteor,  co-founded by Matt DeBergalis, founder of the ActBlue fundraising platform, is listening to their concerns.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user Dominic’s pics

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Meteor Development, the hot startup that aims to remake enterprise software development, picked up some pretty impressive coin in a $11.2 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with contributions from Matrix Partners.

The company’s goal is to help developers write enterprise applications for the webscale era. Meteor’s real-time JavaScript framework – which has generated considerable buzz — lets developers use the JavaScript skill set they already have to build these applications on their local PCs without having to learn and knit together non-JavaScript code (Python, PERL, etc.)  that typically runs on the server.

“We give you a consistent programming environment for both the client and server code. You need to know JavaScript and you will learn some APIs but you no longer have to think two different ways,” he said

GigaOM first reported on this funding round before it closed, in late May.

Meteor will use the money to build the open source community around its offerings. “That means writing software, hiring engineers to help us do that faster and working with developers who are using it,” said company co-founder Matt DeBergalis in an interview. The company now has 7 employees. The long-term revenue opportunity is for Meteor to build commercial add-ons for the existing products, DeBergalis said.

Along with the money, Meteor gets a ton of enterprise software expertise from its new backers. Rod Johnson, founder of SpringSource, now part of VMware, is joining Meteor’s board.  Both Matrix General Partner David Skok , who helped build the JBoss sales strategy and brought JBoss to Red Hat and Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Peter Levine, former CEO of XenSource, will advise the Meteor board.

What Meteor hopes to give enterprise developers is the ability to build the fast, interactive applications they’ve come to appreciate from their experience with Google and Facebook although precious few companies have the resources of those tech giants.

To be sure, Meteor is not alone in this quest. Parse does some of the same things but for mobile app developers. Yahoo’s open-source Mojito framework attacks some of the same problems and got good early reviews, but does not seem to have gotten much traction.

But given this funding and the amount of interest in making enterprise applications as dynamic and interactive as web apps, Meteor is facing a pretty healthy opportunity.

 Photo courtesy of Flickr user tonynetone

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