Show HN: Scaphold.io – A full GraphQL back end in under 5 minutes
scaphold.io
scaphold.io
This is Michael from the Scaphold team.
We are excited to officially launch today and would love to hear any and all feedback on the platform.
A little about us. We are a member of this summer's YC Fellowship class and are pumped to be moving full steam ahead with Scaphold. Over the past few years, my co-founder and I have built numerous REST APIs to back services ranging social music apps to community book swapping programs. Each time, we found that we were running into many of the same problems and building much of the same thing over and over again. We used REST because we didn't know any other way, but something was definitely left to be desired. Last year, after reading a HN post on this little thing called GraphQL, we knew this was the future. A few months later, we set out to build the world's most powerful GraphQL-as-a-Service platform and today we are sharing it with you.
Thank you HN for the support and we can't wait to see what you build!
PS. If you are an experienced React or Relay dev we would love to hear from you as your feedback would invaluable to us. You can connect on our Slack page here (https://scapholdslackin.herokuapp.com) or via our the chat tool on our homepage.
We were actually able to get everything started in under 5 minutes!
There are only a couple in very nascent stages right now. We see this as a good sign since it means that people are in need of more tooling and platforms around such a new technology. Of the other platforms that we're most concerned about, one has built a CLI and another one that's similar to ours hasn't launched quite yet. We differentiate by building a platform that's robust, has end-to-end services like analytics, integrations, and permissions, while still maintaining a level of ease and familiarity through a web interface.
My particular app is read heavy and so I can eliminate the majority of the server calls altogether via caching. While GraphQL would help me fetch only the data I need on each page and decouple the data access, I don't see how I reuse objects across pages without interrogating the GraphQL queries. I haven't given it all that much thought though so maybe I'm missing something.