Announcing Backlift: Deployment and Hosting for Backbone.js | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Backlift: Deployment and Hosting for Backbone.js

backlift.com

201 pointscolevscode50 comments

This is so close to being awesome.

There's several showstoppers for me. If you figure out how to fix them, you'll have my business:

1). Server side validation. If I can't prevent a CSRF attack, it can't be the basis of my app/website.

2). SEO. Figure out a way to serve deep links using the root index.html transparently in a way that is undetectable to the client side (search engines)

3). Build in require.js or leverage some other technology to make backbone app codebases manageable yet compressed and performant in the production environment.

If you can solve 2 and 3, you solve one of the biggest issues I have when writing backbone apps -- I'm often writing my code twice, often in two separate languages, which isn't DRY and feels like a waste of the efficiencies gained by backbone.

If you figure this out, Backbone isn't just for web apps anymore -- it's for any website.

Checkout my post from yesterday to see why I think solutions like this are a bad idea: http://www.projectorpm.com/blog/2012/03/25/rails-is-more-tha...

(Hint: Don't trust clients)

Nice initiative. I am not a big fan of writing in Javascript but it certainly is a big plus to have such a nice library like backbone.js.

Just a tiny point ... About the drawing of the triceratops, he has very mmmmm.... "developed" crotch area. Once you've seen it it's hard to not think about it every time. It's just a little detail but it's a little bit weird!

Good luck !

It is just a bone, you can see the same thing on plenty of other fossils, maybe you just have a dirty mind? :)

I think I've eaten some stupid soup today. Could someone explain to me what the backend is all about? As far as I see it, the command line creates a backbone template and syncs it with the server. Which is dandy, but as it's client code anyway, that's mostly static web hosting.

So now I'm ready to create a hyper-nifty Web 2.71 interface to WHOIS. So normally I'd create a simple web app that serves me my data. Where does backlift come in here, as I'm not doing CRUD all from within the app itself?

Whenever you persist data to a backend, say by calling save() on a model, it seems Backlift will handle the backend for you, that is, it gives you a server to process the PUT request and a place to store the data. Then to retrieve the data on the front end, you just do a fetch().

So now you just do save() and fetch() and you never worry about what happens in between.

I'm rather confused about a few things:

1) Is there no index.html?

2) Can you develop locally?

3) How do you use the templates you showed?

4) Is the boilerplate you provide open sourced anywhere?

1) By default, Backlift generates the index.html file based on a few configurable parameters. We think this will work in many cases since the index file for a backbone.js site can simply provide a container for your html templates.

2) Not currently.

3) If you're starting a new app and you need a starting point you can do so by downloading a template. You can alternatively run "backlift init" with an existing project.

4) Not yet. We're thinking of creating a github project where devs can upload their own templates or tweak ours. Pulled templates will become available from the CLI. We don't have a specific timeline for this yet.

2) Wouldn't http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/backbone-local... work for local development?

By the way, this is being actively developed: https://github.com/jeromegn/Backbone.localStorage

| 2) Not currently.

Shouldnt you be able to create your own index.html and then be fine as long as you dont hit Backbone.sync ?

I'm really happy to see more tools coming out to take some of the effort out of setting up / deploying your development environment. It's refreshing to get more time to actually code rather than administrate systems.

Awesome site design as well!

This looks pretty useful today, and I assume will continue to evolve and add more functionality in time. I have very little clue about frontend apps, so I will use something like this to offload a lot of the tool selection process so I can focus on the app itself. I imagine a lot of developers (especially those not on hn) are the same way.

Curious as to what the backend stack is - can you provide any details?

Data is stored in MongoDB, and assets are packaged with JAMMIT. Two tornado apps run each of backlift.com and backliftapp.com behind NGINX.

Using bare PyMongo, asyncmongo, or some ORM-like solution?

Coincidentally, I'm also working on my own app using Tornado and Backbone and considering the switch to Mongo (currently using the base MySQLdb wrapper included with Tornado) - curious as to how you've found working with whatever Mongo solution you're using.

Edit: Initially forgot to include asyncmongo in that list.

When I tried to request early access, I saw "Hm, there was a problem. We're looking into it. Try again later? Sorry!"

Yeah didn't work for me either.

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/home/sendspree/webapps/backlift.com/lib/python2.6/site-packages/tornado/web.py", line 988, in _execute

getattr(self, self.request.method.lower())(* args, * * kwargs)

File "/home/sendspree/webapps/backlift.com/backlift/backlift/server.py", line 35, in post

raise tornado.web.HTTPError(403)

HTTPError: HTTP 403: Forbidden

Time to go sacrifice the developer that left the debug flag on...

Oh yeah, that was me. FUUUUUUUUUUU

We're trouble shooting now. (and sweating profusely)

Argh. Found the bug. It should be working again now.

Didn't work the first time I tried it. Tried it again about two minutes later and it worked. So it may have been fixed.

Yeah didn't work for me either.

worked for me now. cheers on this amazing project!

does not work for me either

Is there any server side validation? If not this seams cool but ultimately useless in practice.

This seems like a show stopper to me. The inability to have server side validation means there's no way to control access to things, meaning you have to fall back to security through obscurity.

What would be really cool is if instead of a python backend, this had a node backend that used the client side validation mechanism server side to allow server-side validation without needing to duplicate the code. This could theoretically be done transparently if all the classes were named by convention.

Dependent on the language I would think you could add annotation style based validations to the client side code that would be automatically picked up by the deployment system and hence applied to the server side logic. That said I don't (at least to my knowledge) believe that is possible with javascript without modifying the actual client code to fit an api.

This is cool. Will the backend support authentication and authorization?

Definitely on the roadmap, but not for the MVP. We're looking to be a really good rapid prototyping and learning tool first.

Seems pretty awesome if you have actually taken care of all of the backbone sync backend, so you can just use all of the collection create, update, findAll and everything and it just reads from or updates the database?

How do you handle a situation with relationships where you need to specify "give me all of the objects from collection X where parentId is YYYYY"?

Also how do you handle sort of arbitrary queries?

I was thinking about making a service like this because everyone wants to use Backbone.js.

Just wondering how data validation works for this type of model? If you can't rely on the front end how can you reliably tell the back end what to expect?

Right, so this is where the admin interface comes in, allowing you to lock the schema down and setup validation.

What about user authentication and permissions?

Homophone nazi reporting for duty!

"offer a peak" -> "offer a peek" in the bottom (dark) section.

Godwins

seems like this is definitely something that's most useful as an app prototyping tool rather than a deployment environment. and if its a prototyping tool, i'd want it to run locally so i wouldn't have to deal with remote admin / debug

so it should probably just be open on github.

just throw express or restify in front of mongodb with some minimal scaffolding and generators. if i get a minute i'll try to get something like that up

I've been meaning to port a javascript app of mine (private video bookmarking) to backbone for a while. I would love to test this (hint, hint).

haha wow... this seems incredibly unnecessary. An entire hosting platform for a single tiny framework?

I think it's supposed to be a shift from backend/frontend to frontend only, in the same way that Heroku was a shift from building your own infrastructure to just building a backend/frontend. By reducing the surface area, you can reduce the required tools and platform knowledge and reduce the development friction, in theory.

There are plenty of unanswered questions, but I can totally foresee this sort of thing as a viable development platform for some projects in the future.

I've been playing around with backbone.js and it's really promising, because the server acts only as a REST api.

It was a paradigm shift for me. You should try it.

we have / do it when it makes sense (heavy client). Either way we require much more infrastructure for "real" apps than some black-box backend, zmq clusters for computation etc.. I guess this might be an ok playground for some trivial apps

One thing I noticed: the audio volume on the tutorial is way too low... pump it up a little.

Cheers.

Also: lovely idea, attractively clean design. Congrats on shipping!

Currently working on something in a similar vein (design wise), and can't get enough of http://subtlepatterns.com.

Used to very good effect here.

this looks like a stripped back version of parse.com but with code generation for a backbone app that connects only to this service. Good work.

This is parse but for backbone instead of mobile?

I have a backbone todo list running locally and hosting the data on parse. Setting it up took about a minute (good docs yay!).

I don't think you can provide this as a service though as I have my parse credentials in my js file.

Looks awesome Cole!

pricing?

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