

Show HN: GoInstant - A full dev stack for building real-time collaborative apps - jmacd
http://goinstant.com

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brandonwamboldt
I went to a Hackathon at the GoInstant offices recently and got to give this a
try. I'm pretty impressed, I was able to get a collaborative app put together
and working with multiple users without even setting up a server backend.

I did eventually add a server backend to my application for storing data, but
the multi-user parts are all done with GoInstant and work really well, a lot
easier to manage than your traditional Socket.IO based approach.

Anyone interested can checkout my app on GitHub, but be warned. It was done in
one day at a hackathon, so the quality isn't great:
[https://github.com/brandonwamboldt/goreview](https://github.com/brandonwamboldt/goreview)

In Use:
[http://goreview.brandonwamboldt.ca/](http://goreview.brandonwamboldt.ca/)

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dashN9ne
I'm told our office (Twisted Oak Studios) is the old GoInstant office. We're
both companies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There is also Compilr, toplog and a
few others around here. Jevon of GoInstant also does the the
[http://startupnorth.ca](http://startupnorth.ca) blog.

Can't wait to see what people start building with the tech; looks neat.

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jeffandersen
The Roy building? Loved that place.

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ajlburke
I"m really going to miss the Roy Building when they tear it down / turn it
into condos. I can't think of a better place to host your early-stage startup
/ indie dev office in Halifax: prime downtown location, relatively inexpensive
rent, flexible terms, "Maltese Falcon" 1940s decor. I've had two offices
there, but eventually moved on (just across the street though).

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brianjeffcock
I just gave the maps demo a go with a coworker and it worked really well.
Smooth, and responsive (even in street view). It's like having google docs
functionality for everything. Will dig into it more soon, but first impression
was great. Thanks for sharing.

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mrmch
This looks pretty rad, and the GoInstant guys are awesome (hello from west
coast BC!). We run hackdays purely around building multiplayer apps/games, and
more tools to make this easier is great.

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jstash
Hello from BC also! I'm one of the GoInstant devs. I'd be interested coming to
one of your hackdays if you're near Vancouver or Victoria.

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dawsonreid
Really wicked API. Got to see it a week and a half ago when three friends and
I attended a GoInstant hackathon. There we built a web IDE for web languages.
The really neat thing is it was collaborative (like google drive) and
persisted what ever people we were working on, though our project was
completely client side.

GoInstants API took care of both storing our data, and relaying changes
between clients. Really really useful and easy to use.

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jmacd
Hey-- thanks! It was great to get to preview it a bit with some of the local
dev community

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d0m
Hey would be great to see the differences between GoInstant and Firebase. (Or
parse)

Thanks, page and services look great

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gavinuhma
TLDR; Firebase, Parse, GoInstant, and other BaaS have similarities. There is
overlap in the problems they can solve, but specific strengths to each.
GoInstant is specifically focused on Multiplayer Apps.

Firebase and Parse are both awesome products. They are really useful as
application backends. GoInstant is focused completely on multi-user, real-time
data. It compliments your backend, rather than replacing it. All of the
decisions and concepts in our API are there to make it really easy to manage
collaboration between users. It’s completely focused on the idea that you’re
developing for a multi-user use case, either sync or async collaboration.

So, everything that happens with GoInstant involves other users. If you set
data in our key/value store or send a message, other users are listening to
that. Everything is wrapped in a pub/sub msg queue. When you connect or
disconnect, other users know. Of course, you want to decide which users will
know, so we organize groups of users into "rooms". We've built it from the
ground-up with enterprise grade security, so auth, access control, and
encryption are all rock solid.

As a quick example: if you were building a shopping cart, you would store the
products in a backend somewhere (maybe Firebase, Parse, or a relational
database). If you wanted to make that shopping cart multiplayer, i.e: multiple
users shopping, adding products to the cart, and checking out together, you
would use GoInstant for that. It's not that you couldn't accomplish it with
other tech, it's that we're specifically built for multiplayer apps, so it's
going to be intuitive. Who's looking at which product, what page they’re on,
who added what to a cart, who's editing the quantity field: all of these
features come out-of-the-box with GoInstant.

Hope this helps.

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jmacd
If you just want to see it in action: We put up a multi-user Google Maps demo
last night:

[http://maps.goinstant.com/](http://maps.goinstant.com/)

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Ecio78
Error 102 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED): The server refused the connection on
[https://maps.demos.goinstant.org/](https://maps.demos.goinstant.org/)

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jmacd
oops, that was the old URL
[http://maps.goinstant.com/](http://maps.goinstant.com/)

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jonny_eh
What does this do? Nice looking product, list of features, and "how it works"
page, but I'm not clear on what it does for me as a developer.

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jmacd
We want to make it as easy as possible to make an app multi-user and realtime.

The BaaS/etc ecosystem is large and the differences between products can
certainly be confusing. Checkout this cool graphic from the team at Kinvey:
[http://www.kinvey.com/blog/2608/backend-as-a-service-
welcome...](http://www.kinvey.com/blog/2608/backend-as-a-service-welcomes-
vendor-32-salesforcecom).

GoInstant is different in one very important way; we are built for real-time,
multi-user, data-intensive applications. We call these Multiplayer Apps.

Basically it's a way to make your app as interactive as Google Docs, etc., we
manage all the servers and scaling while providing a very straightforward
client-side API.

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cliveowen
That is one hell of a website. Kudos!

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JaretManuel
This looks wildly impressive.

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gavinuhma
Thanks!

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bradpineau
What technologies are you using on the backend?

