Alternatives to DreamFactory

I use LoopBack because it is: * It is truly and Unbelievably Extensible * it is default integrated with OpenAPI (Swagger) Spec Driven REST API * I write lesser codes, because most of the user stories have been covered using the code generation * It's documentation is more compact and well detailed than ExpressJS * It is very easy to learn, hence you can build a basic Rest API App in minutes * It has built in NPM packages required to build my Rest API which saves me time on installation and configuration * The Datasource/Service/Controller concept is just Brilliant (that's mostly all you need to get your app speaking with an External API services) * The support for SOAP and Rest API services is amazing!

We inherited this project and the backend is using LoopBack v3. I haven't taken a look at Loopback.io v4, but I'm planning to replace it. The reason being is that Loopback v3 documentation is a bit confusing and we are having trouble packaging the build using Webpack. Not to mention, integrating unit tests (latest Jest).

I still think Loopback is a great tool, but their documentation is really "messy" and hard to navigate through. There's also a constraint of time from our side. So what's the best option out there?

Should I try upgrading to Loopback v4, or trying other stuff? (i.e. NestJS)

Thanks!

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.

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Amazon API Gateway vs Apigee. How do they compare as an API Gateway? What is the equivalent functionality, similarities, and differences moving from Apigee API GW to AWS API GW?

We needed a lightweight and completely customizable #microservices #gateway to be able to generate #JWT and introspect #OAuth2 tokens as well. The #gateway was going to front all #APIs for our single page web app as well as externalized #APIs for our partners.

We looked at Tyk Cloud and Kong. Kong's plugins are all Lua based and its core is NGINX and OpenResty. Although it's open source, it's not the greatest platform to be able to customize. On top of that enterprise features are paid and expensive. Tyk is Go and the nomenclature used within Tyk like "sessions" was bizarre, and again enterprise features were paid.

We ultimately decided to roll our own using ExpressJS into Express Gateway because the use case for using ExpressJS as an #API #gateway was tried and true, in fact - all the enterprise features that the other two charge for #OAuth2 introspection etc were freely available within ExpressJS middleware.

We opened source Express Gateway with a core set of plugins and the community started writing their own and could quickly do so by rolling lots of ExpressJS middleware into Express Gateway

As for the new support of service mesh pattern by Kong, I wonder how does it compare to Istio?