Alternatives to AWS AppSync

I just finished a web app meant for a business that offers training programs for certain professional courses. I chose this stack to test out my skills in graphql and react. I used Node.js , GraphQL , MySQL for the #Backend utilizing Prisma as a database interface for MySQL to provide CRUD APIs and graphql-yoga as a server. For the #frontend I chose React, styled-components for styling, Next.js for routing and SSR and Apollo for data management. I really liked the outcome and I will definitely use this stack in future projects.

We are starting to build one shirt data logic, structure and as an online clothing store we believe good ux and ui is a goal to drive a lot of click through. The problem is, how do we fetch data and how do we abstract the gap between the Front-end devs and backend-devs as we are just two in the technical unit. We decided to go for GraphQL as our application-layer tool and Prisma for our database-layer abstracter.

Reasons :

GraphQL :

1. GraphQL makes fetching of data less painful and organised.

2. GraphQL gives you 100% assurance on data you getting back as opposed to the Rest design .

3. GraphQL comes with a bunch of real-time functionality in form of. subscriptions and finally because we are using React (GraphQL is not React demanding, it's doesn't require a specific framework, language or tool, but it definitely makes react apps fly )

Prisma :

1. Writing revolvers can be fun, but imagine writing revolvers nested deep down, curry braces flying around. This is sure a welcome note to bugs and as a small team we need to focus more on what that matters more. Prisma generates this necessary CRUD resolves, mutations and subscription out of the box.

2. We don't really have much budget at the moment so we are going to run our logic in a scalable cheap and cost effective cloud environment. Oh! It's AWS Lambda and deploying our schema to Lambda is our best bet to minimize cost and same time scale.

We are still at development stage and I believe, working on this start up will increase my dev knowledge. Off for Lunch :)

Hi Otensia! I'd definitely recommend using the skills you've already got and building with JavaScript is a smart way to go these days. Most platform services have JavaScript/Node SDKs or NPM packages, many serverless platforms support Node in case you need to write any backend logic, and JavaScript is incredibly popular - meaning it will be easy to hire for, should you ever need to.

My advice would be "don't reinvent the wheel". If you already have a skill set that will work well to solve the problem at hand, and you don't need it for any other projects, don't spend the time jumping into a new language. If you're looking for an excuse to learn something new, it would be better to invest that time in learning a new platform/tool that compliments your knowledge of JavaScript. For this project, I might recommend using Netlify, Vercel, or Google Firebase to quickly and easily deploy your web app. If you need to add user authentication, there are great examples out there for Firebase Authentication, Auth0, or even Magic (a newcomer on the Auth scene, but very user friendly). All of these services work very well with a JavaScript-based application.

For inboxkitten.com, an opensource disposable email service;

We migrated our serverless workload from Cloud Functions for Firebase to CloudFlare workers, taking advantage of the lower cost and faster-performing edge computing of Cloudflare network. Made possible due to our extremely low CPU and RAM overhead of our serverless functions.

If I were to summarize the limitation of Cloudflare (as oppose to firebase/gcp functions), it would be ...

1. <5ms CPU time limit
2. Incompatible with express.js
3. one script limitation per domain

Limitations our workload is able to conform with (YMMV)

For hosting of static files, we migrated from Firebase to CommonsHost

More details on the trade-off in between both serverless providers is in the article

I am currently working on a long term mobile app project. Current stack: Frontend: Dart/Flutter Backend: Go, AWS Resources (AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, etc.) Since there are only two developers and we have limited time and resources, we are looking for a BAAS like Firebase or AWS Amplify to handle auth and push notifications for now. We are prioritizing developing speed so we can iterate quickly. The only problem is that AWS amplify support for flutter is in developer preview and has limited capabilities (We have tested it out in our app). Firebase is the more mature option. It has great support for flutter and has more than we need for auth, notifications, etc. My question is that, if we choose firebase, we would be stuck with using two different cloud providers. Is this bad, or is this even a problem? I am willing to change anything on the backend architecture wise, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I am somewhat unfamiliar with Google Cloud Platform. Thank you.

I am now building a React Native app, and I don't know what to choose for my backend between AWS Amplify and Firebase. Which one fits more with react native?

We are building an offline-first Android SDK app. The solution we're working on runs on a mobile device in areas where internet connectivity is intermittent or does not exist. The applications needs to be able to collect data and when it reaches a home base or finds internet connectivity, we'll sync it with the host.

We've heard Realm and Pouchdb could be a good solution, but we are curious if anyone has any experience with either or have another path forward.

If you want to use Pouchdb might as well use RxDB which is an observables wrapper for Pouch but much more comfortable to use. Realm is awesome but Pouchdb and RxDB give you more control. You can use Couchbase (recommended) or CouchDB to enable 2-way sync

We are building a social media app, where users will post images, like their post, and make friends based on their interest. We are currently using Cloud Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database. We are looking for another database like Amazon DynamoDB; how much this decision can be efficient in terms of pricing and overhead?

Which option do you prefer to go with (considering scalability, and a limited budget):

Technologies in use: Angular / .NET Core 6

What do we want to achieve?

We want to create simple near-time web notifications, those notifications can be categorized into 2 sections:

• User notification: which represents user activities and engagements.

• System notification e.g release notes and maintenance time. The notification object is too simple just a title, body, userId, notificationStatus, and readAt. notification status is an enum with 3 values: unread, menuOpened, Read.

Options:

1. use Firebase Realtime Database for user notifications and Microsoft SQL Server for system notifications (maybe using long poling or so to frequently call the getSystemNotification API ).

2. use SignalR to push new notifications along with the SqlServer database and store both user and system into one table (as they almost have the same attributes)

When I joined NYT there was already broad dissatisfaction with the LAMP (Linux Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP) Stack and the front end framework, in particular. So, I wasn't passing judgment on it. I mean, LAMP's fine, you can do good work in LAMP. It's a little dated at this point, but it's not ... I didn't want to rip it out for its own sake, but everyone else was like, "We don't like this, it's really inflexible." And I remember from being outside the company when that was called MIT FIVE when it had launched. And been observing it from the outside, and I was like, you guys took so long to do that and you did it so carefully, and yet you're not happy with your decisions. Why is that? That was more the impetus. If we're going to do this again, how are we going to do it in a way that we're gonna get a better result?

So we're moving quickly away from LAMP, I would say. So, right now, the new front end is React based and using Apollo. And we've been in a long, protracted, gradual rollout of the core experiences.

React is now talking to GraphQL as a primary API. There's a Node.js back end, to the front end, which is mainly for server-side rendering, as well.

Behind there, the main repository for the GraphQL server is a big table repository, that we call Bodega because it's a convenience store. And that reads off of a Kafka pipeline.

At Airbnb we use GraphQL Unions for a "Backend-Driven UI." We have built a system where a very dynamic page is constructed based on a query that will return an array of some set of possible “sections.” These sections are responsive and define the UI completely.

The central file that manages this would be a generated file. Since the list of possible sections is quite large (~50 sections today for Search), it also presumes we have a sane mechanism for lazy-loading components with server rendering, which is a topic for another post. Suffice it to say, we do not need to package all possible sections in a massive bundle to account for everything up front.

Each section component defines its own query fragment, colocated with the section’s component code. This is the general idea of Backend-Driven UI at Airbnb. It’s used in a number of places, including Search, Trip Planner, Host tools, and various landing pages. We use this as our starting point, and then in the demo show how to (1) make and update to an existing section, and (2) add a new section.

While building your product, you want to be able to explore your schema, discovering field names and testing out potential queries on live development data. We achieve that today with GraphQL Playground, the work of our friends at #Prisma. The tools come standard with Apollo Server.

#BackendDrivenUI