Show HN: Aerobatic – Smart Hosting for Single Page Apps | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Aerobatic – Smart Hosting for Single Page Apps

aerobatic.io

68 pointsjgowans31 comments

Might be me, but it won't load in latest Firefox. Bunch of blocked Cross-Origin requests for font files and in the end:

> ReferenceError: ga is not defined

Your anti-tracking addon (e.g. ghostery) is blocking google analytics. They're missing a simple try/catch block somewhere.

Yep, ghostery. Thanks.

It's actually pretty cool. I've just been through all of that painful setup personally. CORS, grunt, SSL, cloudfront, S3, deploy, different stages, minifying, zzz. As others have asked, how do you plan to price such a service? A feature from Heroku I really like is the "Rollback", maybe that's something you may want to add as an added benefit.

Thanks for the feedback. Pricing plan is free for indie devs/small apps, business edition to come with better team support and enhanced backend integrations.

I assume by "rollback" you mean reverting back to a previous app version. With our traffic control rules you can apportion traffic to 1 to many versions at once. So in a simple rollback scenario you would just point 100% of the traffic to a previous version (no redeployment necessary). However you can also do interesting things like direct only 5% of users to a new version or require a special preview link to see the latest version without impacting normal site traffic.

This is actually really great. The ability to proxy api calls is huge, and I think the only thing missing here is automatic seo. If you guys could automatically spit out static HTML files for googles crawlers, I would use this in a heartbeat. Do you have a free tier like heroku? How are you pricing this?

We do have an SEO snapshot capability via a grunt task. Take a look at http://www.aerobatic.io/#!/docs/seo. Note that it relies on the hashbang convention at the moment, but HTML5 pushState support is coming soon. Here's the static snapshot of our homepage that google "sees": http://www.aerobatic.io/?_escaped_fragment_=index.

I find the service great. Though I wondered why I see the hashbang in my adress bar. Is it better for SEO? It's usually used as fallback solution for HTML5 history (pushstate, etc).

HTML5 pushState history is now supported. See http://www.aerobatic.io/docs/seo (no more unsightly #!).

What about dynamic routes, like user profiles? Also, the ease of just letting you guys automatically take care of it would be ideal (especially if I was paying for the service.)

Not exactly sure what you mean by dynamic user profiles routes. With Angular or Ember routing and HTML5 pushState the app developer can create whatever routes they like. Please feel free to follow up with us orville@aerobatic.io

It would be great if third-party provider like SEO4Ajax could be integrated in your service through a plugin/add-on mechanism (cf. like Heroku or Appfog).

Try using SnapSearch (https://snapsearch.io) It already supports all forms of URLs hashbangs and pushstate along with many others.

Looks like this link is broken http://www.aerobatic.io/#!/backend-integration on the docs page.

Thanks for the heads up! The correct URL is http://www.aerobatic.io/#!/docs/backend-integration. Will get that corrected.

Login via GitHub but then I have to manually enter my email address? Why don't you request the 'user:email' scope and get the email automatically?

There were some technical difficulties getting the email scope to work initially but plan on revisiting to streamline the onboarding process. Appreciate the feedback.

Yep, you have to make a separate request to the github API to actually get the address.

And make sure to prompt to select an email address for those that have multiple ones on their accounts.

I think this service is great and I have a question. Have you folks put any thought on allowing custom domains? I am asking because if someone hosts their app with you and, eeris forbid, you go under, they will have a hard time migrating their users to some new domain.

If you had some custom domain mechanism then people would feel safer hosting stuff with you because migrating away would be easier...

Hi - Yes, we already do provide an option for custom domains. Once you've created an app, in your app dashboard, click settings and there's a text box that allows you to provide your custom domain. Thanks for the question.

What about ssl certs for custom domains?

I built a simple web app generator (forms, listings, etc.) and I had a clear roadmap on how to add custom domains but got stumped in handling ssl. It was a toy app for me so I kinda stopped working on it so never really put too much thought on how to handle that problem.

Right now we support SSL out of the box for *.aerobaticapp.com domains. SSL for custom domains is on the roadmap.

Thanks a lot for the answer! :D

blank page, but when I view source, its showing up markup

That happened to me too. Are you using the Disconnect plugin for Firefox (or something similar)? I had to whitelist the site in Disconnect, then it worked.

Thanks! I was seeing blank page because of Disconnect. Unblocking just Google tracking without whitelisting the site worked too.

Firefox with Disconnect should now load correctly. Needed some additional error handling to handle when "ga" is undefined.

This is really awesome.

Front-end hosting + easiest way to create a back-end api (https://api.blockspring.com.) could be a sweet connection. Would love to chat. paul@blockspring.com.

Great work!

Quick heads-up: you have an extra dot at the end of that URL that breaks the link. Also took upwards of 5 seconds to load for me. Looks cool though.

Lets chat as well - I'm the founder of BitBalloon (https://www.bitballoon.com), we do static hosting as well. mathias@bitballoon.com

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