playkia For my latest project, I started a small backend library that is heavily inspired by Flox. As you might know, I didn't write the code for the server-side of Flox (that was my friend Holger), so it has been a new experience for me, as well.
I picked the following technologies:
- The app uses only standard, open source technologies that can basically be deployed anywhere. This is to prevent the lock-in that we had in the App Engine.
- I'm using Ruby and its Sinatra library to create the actual REST API. The reason: it's very lightweight and simple, and I'm a fan of the Ruby scripting language. I could also have used Ruby on Rails, but I wanted something with less "magic" behind the scenes, where I can better understand what's going on.
- Although I could run the app on any hosting service that runs Ruby, I will probably deploy it on Heroku. It's not the cheapest service around, but the advantage is that you can scale the app to practically any amount of traffic. If the app is not successful, I can still just migrate over to my current provider, Uberspace.
- I'm using PostgreSQL as the database, mainly because of its JSON support. But you could probably just use MySQL, too.
This is just to share my findings — I don't know yet if I will make the new service an open source project. The thing is: I'm not a web developer, so I'm probably making a lot of mistakes. 😉 For the time being, I'll just use this code as the backend for my new project, and many parts that were available in Flox are still missing (for example, I haven't got any statistics and logs yet, which is the part most of you most heavily require).
Once my current project is out in the wild, I'll review if making this open source would be useful. This will, however, be only after Flox has already shut down, I'm afraid. For now, I've got to focus on finishing something that actually earns me some money. 😜