Show HN: GoInstant - A full dev stack for building real-time collaborative apps | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: GoInstant - A full dev stack for building real-time collaborative apps

goinstant.com

46 pointsjmacd21 comments

I went to a Hackathon at the GoInstant offices recently and got to give this a try. I'm pretty impressed, I was able to get a collaborative app put together and working with multiple users without even setting up a server backend.

I did eventually add a server backend to my application for storing data, but the multi-user parts are all done with GoInstant and work really well, a lot easier to manage than your traditional Socket.IO based approach.

Anyone interested can checkout my app on GitHub, but be warned. It was done in one day at a hackathon, so the quality isn't great: https://github.com/brandonwamboldt/goreview

In Use: http://goreview.brandonwamboldt.ca/

I'm told our office (Twisted Oak Studios) is the old GoInstant office. We're both companies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There is also Compilr, toplog and a few others around here. Jevon of GoInstant also does the the http://startupnorth.ca blog.

Can't wait to see what people start building with the tech; looks neat.

The Roy building? Loved that place.

I"m really going to miss the Roy Building when they tear it down / turn it into condos. I can't think of a better place to host your early-stage startup / indie dev office in Halifax: prime downtown location, relatively inexpensive rent, flexible terms, "Maltese Falcon" 1940s decor. I've had two offices there, but eventually moved on (just across the street though).

drop by sometime and say hi! We've made a real mess of things.

I just gave the maps demo a go with a coworker and it worked really well. Smooth, and responsive (even in street view). It's like having google docs functionality for everything. Will dig into it more soon, but first impression was great. Thanks for sharing.

This looks pretty rad, and the GoInstant guys are awesome (hello from west coast BC!). We run hackdays purely around building multiplayer apps/games, and more tools to make this easier is great.

Hello from BC also! I'm one of the GoInstant devs. I'd be interested coming to one of your hackdays if you're near Vancouver or Victoria.

Really wicked API. Got to see it a week and a half ago when three friends and I attended a GoInstant hackathon. There we built a web IDE for web languages. The really neat thing is it was collaborative (like google drive) and persisted what ever people we were working on, though our project was completely client side.

GoInstants API took care of both storing our data, and relaying changes between clients. Really really useful and easy to use.

Hey-- thanks! It was great to get to preview it a bit with some of the local dev community

Hey would be great to see the differences between GoInstant and Firebase. (Or parse)

Thanks, page and services look great

TLDR; Firebase, Parse, GoInstant, and other BaaS have similarities. There is overlap in the problems they can solve, but specific strengths to each. GoInstant is specifically focused on Multiplayer Apps.

Firebase and Parse are both awesome products. They are really useful as application backends. GoInstant is focused completely on multi-user, real-time data. It compliments your backend, rather than replacing it. All of the decisions and concepts in our API are there to make it really easy to manage collaboration between users. It’s completely focused on the idea that you’re developing for a multi-user use case, either sync or async collaboration.

So, everything that happens with GoInstant involves other users. If you set data in our key/value store or send a message, other users are listening to that. Everything is wrapped in a pub/sub msg queue. When you connect or disconnect, other users know. Of course, you want to decide which users will know, so we organize groups of users into "rooms". We've built it from the ground-up with enterprise grade security, so auth, access control, and encryption are all rock solid.

As a quick example: if you were building a shopping cart, you would store the products in a backend somewhere (maybe Firebase, Parse, or a relational database). If you wanted to make that shopping cart multiplayer, i.e: multiple users shopping, adding products to the cart, and checking out together, you would use GoInstant for that. It's not that you couldn't accomplish it with other tech, it's that we're specifically built for multiplayer apps, so it's going to be intuitive. Who's looking at which product, what page they’re on, who added what to a cart, who's editing the quantity field: all of these features come out-of-the-box with GoInstant.

Hope this helps.

If you just want to see it in action: We put up a multi-user Google Maps demo last night:

http://maps.goinstant.com/

Error 102 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED): The server refused the connection on https://maps.demos.goinstant.org/

oops, that was the old URL http://maps.goinstant.com/

What does this do? Nice looking product, list of features, and "how it works" page, but I'm not clear on what it does for me as a developer.

We want to make it as easy as possible to make an app multi-user and realtime.

The BaaS/etc ecosystem is large and the differences between products can certainly be confusing. Checkout this cool graphic from the team at Kinvey: http://www.kinvey.com/blog/2608/backend-as-a-service-welcome....

GoInstant is different in one very important way; we are built for real-time, multi-user, data-intensive applications. We call these Multiplayer Apps.

Basically it's a way to make your app as interactive as Google Docs, etc., we manage all the servers and scaling while providing a very straightforward client-side API.

That is one hell of a website. Kudos!

This looks wildly impressive.

Thanks!

What technologies are you using on the backend?

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