
Show HN: Serverless Single Page Applications - marktangotango
Please check out out project,  Lite Engine[1], a Backend as a Service web application platform.  We provide everything you need to rapidly prototype and deploy your single page applications: static file hosting for your html, css, javascript and other assets, a subdomain on our site, security with https, and a &#x27;create your own API&#x27; with SQL over CORS and JSON. I think of this as &quot;geocities with a CORS backend&quot;.<p>For your backend we&#x27;ve developed a system we call API Queries. You&#x27;ll define SQL queries, save them on the backend, then execute them with http post requests that return JSON responses. There are obviously a lot of pros and cons to this &#x27;stored procedure&#x27; approach. Please chime in with your thoughts below!<p>Right now we&#x27;re offering free accounts while we gauge interest. We plan to offer custom domains with paid accounts. What this means is when you signup for a free account, you will get a &#x27;myapp.lite-engine.com&#x27; domain, with a paid account, we&#x27;ll host your &#x27;www.myapp.com&#x27; site, secured with Let&#x27;s Encrypt certs.<p>All feedback appreciated!<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lite-engine.com
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explorigin
Please don't call this "serverless". BAAS/PAAS is very much a server enabling
apps that require a server. The term "serverless" is ambiguous at best but the
general idea is that the HTTP server the hosts the SPA is just the application
installation vehicle and is not required for normal SPA functionality.

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marktangotango
Thanks for the feedback. I agree 'serverless' is ambiguous, but it does fit
the definition here[1]. We are providing more than static file hosting, data
storage and user management for example. One could of course use other 'cloud'
services for these functions.

Our goal was to combine them into a 'rapid web application development'
platform. I'd like to hear other opinions on this.

[1]
[http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html](http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html)

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stevenwiles
Come on man, you know better than that.

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ruler88
I don't really think using lite engine is that much easier than just building
your own backend and hosting on AWS? Some of the library utilities you guys
have are pretty cool and convenient. But there are lots of open source
libraries that do much the same thing. I'm not sure where the target audience
would be. People who can code don't like the restriction, people who can't
code will not be able to set this up.

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marktangotango
One slogan I've thinking about is "Develop websites, don't waste your time
admining servers". Me personally, I've been coding professionally for a long
time, I have always had lots of ideas, but the last thing I want to do with my
limited free time is setup a server, I certainly don't want to do it in the
environment I code in every day (java enterprise).

So, this product scratches my own itch, I just want to code a web application,
that's it!

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ruler88
I don't mean to break your balls, I think this is a great concept. But I think
with what you were saying "don't waste your time admining servers". There are
many PaaS products these days that help you with that. You can get a heroku
server up and running in just a few minutes. I guess what I'm wondering is:
why would I go with you instead of heroku?

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marktangotango
Please break away, that's the best feedback I've gotten. Honestly I think what
you're saying has a lot of merit, and given that I'm not getting much traction
with this project at all, I think a lot of people feel the same way. My
question for you, what could this or a similar service offer to make you
choose it over Heroku for example?

I'll add I think there's an opportunity for price reduction with the hosted
single page app concept I'm promoting, $5 a month for an aws t1 micro (for 3
year reserve) vs $5 a year for a solution like Lite Engine.

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ruler88
I personally wouldn't trade the stability of aws/heroku for $5 difference a
month.

I do think the opportunity is available for making the process easier for
specific technology stack. For example, I used Meteor's galaxy hosting
platform 'cause it works so nicely with Meteor applications. And it is so
simple to do, the toolbelt makes it so that it is literally a one-line command
line to configure and deploy. And I know that it JUST WORKS, I don't need to
worry about nuisances of Meteor hosting.

What if something like this exists for say React? The JS tools fatigue is
drowning all React devs. If you can make something that is super simple for
say webpack deployment. That would be sweet! I'd pay a premium for that
convenience and knowledge that I'm not doing something stupid.

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marktangotango
But Lite Engine is running on AWS! For your react example, for Lite Engine, to
deploy a react/webpack frontend application, you'd build it, zip it, and
upload it. There are lots of static file hosting soluttions around now (github
pages, bit balloon, etc) so I'm not sure what you have in mind there.

I think ultimately, the message I'd like to convey is, 'it' doesn't have to be
that hard to deploy a single page app. This is heresy to many :)

Thanks again for the feedback I really do appreciate it!

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fiatjaf
This is cool, but should be called "Lite Engine", not "Serverless Single Page
Applications".

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marktangotango
Thanks! When I came back to this, it was too late to edit. I'll keep that in
mind for future submissions!

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fiatjaf
[https://www.lite-engine.com](https://www.lite-engine.com)

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mkrishnan
Looks very similar to backliftapp which provided Dropbox sync.

how can a user take periodical backup of data?

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marktangotango
I couldn't find any info on backlift, which was acquired by squarespace. I'd
comment that we're going for a toolkit to build sites, were as squarespace
gives you a canned set of features, with our service you can build almost
anything you can imagine. Something similar would be syncano, were they seem
to be nosql, we are sql.

Data backup besides our periodic update (we haven't finalized the frequency,
hourly for example) is through an api to pull a snapshot. Otherwise, we're
considering backing up the database to a user provided S3 bucket.

