Hoist – Fast API based web development | Hacker News Reader

Hoist – Fast API based web development

hoistapps.com

20 pointsowenwil14 comments

We're working on a no-backend solution to help developers build great entirely client-side cloud apps. We provide a set of API's that can be used if you host on our platform or off it, and they work with any language. There are Restful API's for user authentication/signup, data management and more, as well as an easy way to get your app hooked up with other cloud API's like Twitter/Spotify/Facebook in a client-side app, which has been quite tricky until now.

We provide a Javascript library for these apps but you can also roll your own, since all our APIs are documented and are simple get/post requests.

It's quite a new space so there's only a handful of companies doing this; Hoodie is one of the others that is most notable.

Would love to hear what HackerNews thinks and happy to answer any questions.

What's the difference between your service and Hoodie, GoInstant and Firebase?

We're somewhat similar to GoInstant (not so much Hoodie) but the difference is we're building out a platform with a lot of features to help make development easier as well as faster. You can connect your app up to Github or Dropbox to sync your code on the fly, for example. Or, you can use our environments feature to create a clone of your production code to work on new features in a sandbox.

We've got some unique features, such the ability to connect with other cloud apps' API's such as Xero, Spotify or Twitter in your client-side app.

In the future, we'll also have Billing API's so you can quickly charge your app's customers, a search API for client-side apps so that Google can index them correctly and are looking at building out a marketplace so developers are able to on-sell their apps to others too.

Firebase's offering is similar to our Data API, but the differentiation is that we've built out a number of other features around it that are complementary and add value for developers, as well as offering hosting for them.

Sounds nice!

I tried GoInstant, but didn't like the coding-style of the API.

Starbucks logo looks nothing like those round icons they've used under "Some more great features" but why did I immediately think of Starbucks when I was looking at them?

I'm not even a coffee aficionado.

Those screamed Starbucks to me too. I guess starbucks have done nice work with their branding and marketing, such that anybody looking at a circle with some writing and frilly bits thinks "Starbucks".

All hail our glorious overlord Starbucks! I can see how you might think it was that at a glance :)

Cool to see an NZ-based business on HN. I'll have a play around this week and give feedback - hope your visit to SF is going well! The site is looking super polished (I want to steal your designer) too.

Thanks Mandatum, we would love the feedback! The team is having a great time in San Francisco, lots of amazing people to meet.

Appreciate the kind words - we love our designer too :)

I signed up and got to the https://go.hoistapps.com/welcomeSource page and when I try and click "Get started" with upload selected I get a js error.

Fixed now! Sorry about that!

"Some more great features: [...] Billing"

"COMING SOON!: [...] Billing"

Looks like a nice service, but things like these always make me cringe a bit. Also: No pricing :(

I totally understand! We're working on getting it right, but it will be coming soon. There are too many terrible billing services out there for websites.

Here's some basic info on pricing, but we haven't put it up too publicly yet as we're trying to get it right: http://hoistapps.com/terms/pricing

Any thoughts about forking Angular and building in Hoist support to make an officially supported Angular/Hoist client side library?

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