New release of Meteor 0.5.3: Stakes around improvements to the runtime environment.

For those unfamiliar, Meteor aims to be an open-source platform for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time.

In fact, whether you're an expert developer or just getting started, this tool may help you. The new changes pending the next major scaling release announced at the end of January 2013 are presented as motivated by apps under development.

The highlights in 0.5.3 henceforth include: Adds the --settings argument to meteor deploy and meteor run. This allows you to specify deployment-specific information made available to server code in the variable Meteor.settings. It's particularly helpful for properties that differ between development, staging, and production environments.

Minimongo henceforth supports live queries with skip or limit (helpful for rendering "top-10" lists with #each); sorting results on dotted.sub.keys; querying for specific array elements like foo.1.bar; and JavaScript RegExp selectors in updates and removes.

Re-rendering a template with Spark no longer reverts changes made by users to a preserved form element. Instead, the newly rendered value is only applied if it is different from the previously rendered value. Additionally, <INPUT> elements with type other than TEXT can now have reactive values (eg, the labels on submit buttons can now be reactive). The 0.5.3 release also improves <SELECT> rendering and preserves nested data contexts in IE.

Accounts adds support for "offline" access tokens with Google login; improves OAuth1Binding to permit authenticated API calls to OAuth1 providers like Twitter; preserves serviceData fields from previous logins when logging in with an external service, and restructures accounts-ui so that new login provider packages automatically work with the loginButtons helper.etc.

You can find the Full release notes available here.