
Bowery – The Next Generation of Web Development - sjkaliski
http://bowery.io
======
jmduke
I am impressed by how much time I've spent on the site (and still don't
understand exactly what it does or why it's worth $40/user/mo.) I am also
impressed by how the future of web development is a node.js package.

To the creators: you are clearly capable of creating slick marketing (the site
looks great!), I'd advise spending some time working on your value
proposition. The "Just code / Just branch / Just works" trifecta is pithy, but
it doesn't exactly explain what Bowery offers. (Also, having your _learn more_
CTA redirect to the docs -- which start out with how to install Bowery -- is
not ideal.)

(Also, as an FYI: the link to 'Philosophy' in the docs is broken.)

~~~
dbyrd
I think the cool part is that that you could do all of this stuff and not have
to worry about any of the infrastructure.

The node package only works inside of the hosting environment. You're paying
that much money for everything to be hosted. It says in the docs that there's
no local development environment.

~~~
pfarrell
You will always have to worry about the infrastructure. This might be a view
of hosted development's future, but every abstraction will leak. When the day
the your app gets more sign ups in an hour than you have in your userbase,
you'd better understand your env as deeply as possible.

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untog
_Unlike most development environments, Bowery requires an internet
connection._

And I'm out.

So, this seems like a sort of Google App Engine, but running on Node? BoweryDB
and the Cache sound just like what App Engine provides - except that the App
Engine also runs on my local dev box.

The problem with this (and the App Engine) is that it's totally locked in.
Your database is proprietary, your middleware is proprietary... at least App
Engine is backed by Google. What happens when you guys go bust? There's no way
I can use a platform like this without knowing I have an open fallback out
there somewhere.

~~~
plorkyeran
AppEngine's lockin is significantly overstated. AppScale exists and works
well.

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trimbo
Do you know of any sites/services that are using AppScale in production and
what their volume is? (I googled for "powered by" and found nothing)

~~~
idProQuo
Last I heard Udacity is powered by App Engine. There was an interview about it
with the CEO at the end of the Web Development course, and he seemed pretty
pleased with it.

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javajosh
My take: Bowery is basically Google App Engine for Node.js.

Of course, they put their own spin on things. The whole 'bowery connect' thing
is unusual - they say that your "dev environment is online" but I'm not sure
what they mean. It appears that what 'bowery connect' does is initialize a git
repository and starts sync'ing filesystem changes to a remote host. In other
words, rather than GAE's more traditional "deploy" command, bowery is
constantly deploying.

The benefit of doing deploy in this way is clear: it's much easier on the user
(nothing to install apart from an editor), and it's much easier on the bowery
people because they don't have to provide a local analogue to the hosted
environment. The dev environment is the hosted environment. This is possible
because, presumably, the hosted environment serves branch URLs extremely
cheaply.

No doubt the kernel of this project has it's origin in a late night
conversation that started, "What if HTTP endpoints were as cheap as git
branches? What if you had an active endpoint for every branch?"

~~~
dbyrd
"What if HTTP endpoints were as cheap as git branches? What if you had an
active endpoint for every branch?"

I really like that

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tingletech
Another group in my office has been doing this for a long time, except with
hg. They have it set up so that whenever you push a branch to dev, there is a
[branchname].dev.[propertyname].org. You push to the master branch on the
production machine, and then that is what is running the production site.

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andrewvc
I mean, I get the idea behind these platforms without building your own
platform services. However, if you actually plan on growing as a company it
would seem to me these services have very specific walls in terms of
functionality. I've never worked to the company reported that didn't wind up
leaning on things like complex SQL queries and other abstractions that these
people are telling us we don't need.

I can see how this would work for a limited set of apps that only have simple
API needs. Given that, it's perplexing that they would make such ridiculous
claims and it's hard to take them seriously. When you just want to run a
simple report using a SQL closet and have to tables and uses a fancy GROUP BY,
you will be left out in the cold and have to run a gigantic batch job in
whatever programming language you use to figure this out. I am not impressed.

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JacksonGariety
> Our Philosophy: Web development is terrible.

Go fuck yourself, Bowery.

~~~
javajosh
But web development _is_ terrible. There are so many approaches, languages,
frameworks, and philosophies - its incredibly hard for newbies to enter the
field.

Educational systems have evolved a solution for this kind of thing: you
isolate newbies from conflict. You essentially lie to them, you simplify the
situation, and tell them "do this". They do it, and now they know something.
Now they have a bit of skin in the game, they have a data point to participate
in future academic conflict.

But with modern web dev, the conflict is up-front-and-center, and newbies are
not isolated from it.

Bowery, GAE, and meteor address these issues in a very similar way: they make
reasonable up-front decisions about how an app should be structured. You can
deviate, but the defaults are not bad.

These decisions are a real pain point for a lot of people, and I think that's
what they meant with that statement. I would also add: be careful defending
complexity. It is very easy for a professional who's built a career navigating
complexity to descry reductions to that complexity, as it will directly affect
her ability to make money.

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hcarvalhoalves
> BoweryDB is more of a data management application then a database. It
> analyzes access paterns to cache frequently-used data, and knows when you
> make updates in your code to make sure the cache is never stale. All that
> matters from the developers' point of view is the code they use to interact
> with it.

This paragraph is funny. They call it something other than a database, then
describe what a DBMS does.

I also find strange version control is bolted in the platform, you could have
just provided hooks so you can deploy from branch X or tag Y.

The idea is good though, I can see the value proposition.

~~~
dbyrd
There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes. Think about DynamoDB vs Riak.

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methehack
It seems like this would yield a really enjoyable workflow. The pricing model
([http://bowery.io/pricing/](http://bowery.io/pricing/)) makes it difficult
for me to transfer into an actual monthly price. Seems like that could be
remedied with a few scenarios.

Also, one of the things I love about heroku is the free starting point. It
really lets me play with an idea without committing to hardly anything. Is
there a similar free starting place with bowery?

~~~
sjkaliski
Hey thanks for checking it out. We're working on a few ways to make the
pricing easier to digest.

We've been discussing a free starting point, but haven't solidified anything
just yet.

Right now we're bootstrapped. There's only three of us, so the focus so far
has been on getting the product in a useable and workable state.

~~~
elsigh
I think without a free starting point of some kind, this is going to be a
tough sell. Perhaps a week free or something like that would enable someone to
see if they like it enough to start paying for it.

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geuis
"$1 per KB read per second. $2 per KB written per second."

I'm out. Completely killed any interest right here. This pricing is just
ludicrous.

~~~
dbyrd
Sorry, that's a typo. It's supposed to be in cents and not dollars.

~~~
geuis
Hah! Ok, I'll take a look again.

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beaumartinez
I had a cursory glance, and this has nothing to do with Twitter's Bower[1], a
package manager for web libraries (hell, even the TLD is the same). Bowery is
a misleading name, and it gives the impression they are somehow related.

[1] [http://bower.io/](http://bower.io/)

~~~
nagrom
Interestingly, 'bowery' is Glaswegian slang for 'come on, then!' or 'bring
it!' \- indicating aggression [1].

[1]
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bowery](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bowery)

~~~
teh_klev
Here's some others to pick from, my money would be on something to to with New
York [1], rather than Glasgow street slang.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowery_(disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowery_\(disambiguation\))

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rubiquity
I combed your entire website and I don't have any answers as to what your
product does or why it is the future of Web development and I'm not interested
in giving you my email address to find out.

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icefox
If you follow the link on the main page to "Learn more about how Bowery
works." it first asks you to install npm

1) Is npm something that comes standard with any operating system these days?

2) Why do I have to install something on my system to "learn" how it works?

This page should probably be what many comments here are trying to say which
is that the site doesn't really say what it is. Something like Google App
Engine, but using Node?

~~~
idProQuo
npm is the Node Package Manager. I think it's assumed that if you've been
working with Node.js (or other things in its family, like CoffeeScript),
you've already downloaded npm. It's like when a Python framework says "Just
use pip install!" or a Ruby project says "Download our gem!"

That said, they really should have more info before dropping you on the
install page.

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ZirconCode
I'm not quite sure what it does, but it looks like a framework which
integrates your hosting solution?

Also, Is it me or is the pricing ridiculous?

The names great.

I might have misunderstood a lot, it's very unclear and I'm confused. Also if
the UI are part of the package, they look too "bootstrappy", if that's a valid
complaint.

~~~
dbyrd
UI is not part of the package. Thanks for the feedback!

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chrisbridgett
I find it mildly annoying that it's so similarly named and so completely
unrelated to Bower - the extremely popular package manager...

~~~
dbyrd
Bowery is a street/neighborhood in New York City.

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pkorzeniewski
_$1 per KB read per second._

I'm confused, what does it exactly mean? You pay $1 for every KB read from DB,
so 10MB will cost you $10.240 or what?

~~~
sjkaliski
It's a measurement of throughput. So the maximum data transferred/sec at any
given time.

Good call, I'll update the pricing to clarify that.

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rookonaut
The documentation looks nice, but the pricing page is just confusing (at least
for my colleague and me).

~~~
dbyrd
that's good feedback. Would a pricing calculator help or is it just that there
are too many cost centers?

~~~
rookonaut
A calculator would probably help. How about showing some sample setups (and
their resulting costs) for different kinds of webapps?

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detay
$1 per KB read per second. $2 per KB written per second.

wait. what?

~~~
sjkaliski
Hey sorry, this was a typo. It's cents :)

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rfnslyr
After going through the documentation and your home page, I still have no idea
what this product is actually about.

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Shish2k
Looks to me like a proprietary web framework nicely integrated with a
proprietary database and proprietary cache.

If their DB & cache really are as great at automatic optimisation as they say
then I might be interested as stand-alone products to run alongside my current
stack; not a great fan of vendor lock-in though, so I think I'll be skipping
it for now :(

~~~
rfnslyr
Am I the only one that absolutely hates downloading, exploring, configuring,
and managing new software? I don't trust it. I rather use something old with a
known track record.

