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Comment by GTP | Hacker News Reader

I'm missing something here. I'm familiar with TomCat, but that's an application server for JVM programs. Here the project specifies which technologies are used to develop it, but which kind of applications will it serve? Are the applications supported by this server using a specific runtime? Will it serve native applications? Sorry for the naive questions, I'm not into web development.

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It's a continuation of a trend in which open source projects mimick the functionality of a tool called Firebase that Google bought in 2014 and is now part of Google Cloud (see also supabase and pocketbase). All these projects seem to be sort of like Redis in as much as they stick a datastore behind an API saving users from needing to use SQL and offering them a higher level API instead. And it also seems to do some sort of auth things.

I think it's meant for people who want to build a front end without building a backend.

It's kinda like only the backend part of a cms system. Say if you took the backend part of Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal and exposed apis for a user developed frontend.

> stick a datastore behind an API saving users from needing to use SQL and offering them a higher level API instead

supabase team here. Yes, we offer an auto-generated API (using PostgREST). But users can also connect directly to their Postgres database or through a connection pooler. People have preferences, so we offer options.

I don’t think this was (is? I don’t follow it too closely) the use case for Redis.

You don't think Redis is a datastore with an API?

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