CEO of Restspace.io, which lets you build and integrate backends with tiny services and no code. Been CTO and developed across the stack at a range of agencies and startups.
Great response! Yes this is pretty much what I'm trying to do with Restspace. One way of standardising the connection between components is that even small components running on the same server all use the data structure of an HTTP message to communicate. Within the same server, code level routing sends these HTTP data structures without using the wire, but the runtime determines if the URL is external and goes across the net if necessary. This creates internal interoperability, allows the components to be distributed across servers however you like, and potentially pulls in every API available on the internet. Then the structure of the API is standardised across services providing the same functionality by adapting internal and third party services. For instance, the basic data API is simply to do a GET to read data or a PUT/POST to write data to a url. Data structures are defined by JSON Schemas. The service providing this API can have an adapter plugged into it which talks to the file system, MongoDb, S3, a SQL database or whatever.
This then enables a module/package to know where and how it needs to store data. For instance the 'full stack' auth package can be told a url in the data store API for storing user records, and it immediately knows how to do this, without restricting what underlying technology you want to use. An email package then also knows how to get user data and can just be wired up to the url in order to get the user data to customise an email template.
To your points, having been working on this for a while, the effort is actually not that massive, at least to get a set of core functions together. There would likely be some fragmentation initially but like most of these things, there are network effects at work and the winner of an initial battle would become a de facto standard. Dev has constantly been pushing effort up the stack and away from the generic into the more distinctive aspects of applications. I recently saw a Twitter threads where devs listed the things they hated doing repeatedly, and those are the things a system like this would be ideal for.
Very cool project and a great effort, I've saved this to my notes, looks worth trying out. By the way is it open source? I saw a couple of Github repos (github.com/restspace) but looks like that covers only a small part of it. Ah I see the answer here in the docs:
"We are also considering open-sourcing the runtime so you can run it wherever you wish"
So that would be "not yet but maybe in the future".
CEO of Restspace.io, which lets you build and integrate backends with tiny services and no code. Been CTO and developed across the stack at a range of agencies and startups.
Many thanks for the kind words! Yes, basically I'd love to open source this but it will never fulfil its promise unless there is some cashflow to support development. Quite likely it will work as an open source project with a paid for hosting like the model Wordpress has, however it needs some thought how to do that without losing the chance to make some revenue. I'll definitely open source components which it makes sense to do.
Great response! Yes this is pretty much what I'm trying to do with Restspace. One way of standardising the connection between components is that even small components running on the same server all use the data structure of an HTTP message to communicate. Within the same server, code level routing sends these HTTP data structures without using the wire, but the runtime determines if the URL is external and goes across the net if necessary. This creates internal interoperability, allows the components to be distributed across servers however you like, and potentially pulls in every API available on the internet. Then the structure of the API is standardised across services providing the same functionality by adapting internal and third party services. For instance, the basic data API is simply to do a GET to read data or a PUT/POST to write data to a url. Data structures are defined by JSON Schemas. The service providing this API can have an adapter plugged into it which talks to the file system, MongoDb, S3, a SQL database or whatever.
This then enables a module/package to know where and how it needs to store data. For instance the 'full stack' auth package can be told a url in the data store API for storing user records, and it immediately knows how to do this, without restricting what underlying technology you want to use. An email package then also knows how to get user data and can just be wired up to the url in order to get the user data to customise an email template.
To your points, having been working on this for a while, the effort is actually not that massive, at least to get a set of core functions together. There would likely be some fragmentation initially but like most of these things, there are network effects at work and the winner of an initial battle would become a de facto standard. Dev has constantly been pushing effort up the stack and away from the generic into the more distinctive aspects of applications. I recently saw a Twitter threads where devs listed the things they hated doing repeatedly, and those are the things a system like this would be ideal for.
Right, I see what your getting at, very interesting ... looks very well thought out with these services, pipelines, data transforms and so on:
restspace.io/
Very cool project and a great effort, I've saved this to my notes, looks worth trying out. By the way is it open source? I saw a couple of Github repos (github.com/restspace) but looks like that covers only a small part of it. Ah I see the answer here in the docs:
"We are also considering open-sourcing the runtime so you can run it wherever you wish"
So that would be "not yet but maybe in the future".
Many thanks for the kind words! Yes, basically I'd love to open source this but it will never fulfil its promise unless there is some cashflow to support development. Quite likely it will work as an open source project with a paid for hosting like the model Wordpress has, however it needs some thought how to do that without losing the chance to make some revenue. I'll definitely open source components which it makes sense to do.
Yes I definitely see what you mean, I get your point, totally.