Backlift beta now open, featuring auth, validation and auto refresh | Hacker News Reader

Backlift beta now open, featuring auth, validation and auto refresh

backlift.com

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Backlift seems like a great tool thank you for taking this step! I was setup in 5 minutes. The writing on the setup docs is straightforward so I think I could pass your link on to "less techy" friends and they would be able to be up and running quickly. The general docs are also well written. I am curious and have two questions: 1. Is the data stored in CouchDB, Mongo or other? and 2. The docs mention "eventually... deploying production websites used by millions." Please can you tell us the eventual date? Also I would like local development but I think I can guess that you guys will not prioritize this as your target users might not make it through the conversion funnel of getting the software setup on their own computers. All-in-all, bravo, I think you are on to something great here.

Thanks! The database is mongo. We can't put a date on production yet. Local development is a feature we've thought about a lot. Our servers rely on several third party tools, and ensuring those are available locally would amount to building a package management system, or having a lot of dependencies. We think part of the value proposition of backlift is its minimal installation, and both of those strategies add complexity. We have, however, tried to make backlift work with external build tools. So in theory you could use backlift with something like brunch.io.

After reading this post, and trying backlift out, which by the way looks Very promising and easy to use (to boot)!

I came across the following bug: https://github.com/backlift/docs/issues/1

Cant wait for it to be resolved so I can give backlift a good go.

I got a beta invite about a week ago, but after reading how they only want you to use JST templates and such I avoided it. Is this actually the case or is that just the standard template (and documentation) recommendation?

Cole from backlift here. It's a temporary limitation. We just haven't integrated other template libraries yet. If you shoot us an email at support at backlift.com with the template library you use, we'll prioritize it.

Had a quick run through over lunch - looks really promising :)

Going to use it to rapid prototype an app this week - just one thing, any prospect of coffeescript in the pipeline?

nice stuff I will try it, but how is it going to work in The future? there is no information about this anywhere... maybe it's free for first adopters :) ?

no answer whatsoever, not even a "it will be charged but we don't know how much yet" How can I start to develop something real there without knowing that ?

Sorry. You've got it. We arent sure yet. It depends a on what kind of people get most excited about backlift. Will our users be mostly designers? People just learning how to code? Will people want to deploy production websites with backlift or use it primarily for rapid prototyping? I think different answers may point to very different pricing models.

awesome stuff. will try it out over the weekend. would be nice to have some sort of backend storage a la StackMob.

Doesn't Backlift have that?

""" Give the database dude a break. Backlift offers a full back-end-as-a-service including:

Data persistence and validation that works with backbone's sync mechanism """

Looks pretty awesome, I'm thinking of playing around with it this weekend as well.

I'm not sure how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go in terms of explaining to your users how to get a dev environment set up, but:

on OS X you need to run `brew install libyaml` before you install backlift via easy_install

Also the correct flag for easy_install is --upgrade, not --update.

Libyaml is not a requirement, the installer will fallback to a pure python yaml library if libyaml isn't available. It does report a rather confusing error, however, before completing the install. If this wasn't the case for you please shoot me an email at support at backlift.com so I can investigate. Thanks for catching the upgrade/update error.

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