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Comment by xixixao | Hacker News Reader

If you're looking for something that fits the motivation (including "give me the developer experience of the 90s"), but uses a language you probably know already (JavaScript), check out https://www.convex.dev/.

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I remember when early 2000s enterprise web development had J2EE, a convoluted mess of over-abstraction oversold by Sun, presumably so they could sell more servers. I recall a Sun consultant telling us that this was the "one true way". Meanwhile, we got the job done with PHP (albeit the kind of PHP that got written in the early 2000s could be its own convoluted mess).

Now you hear consultants telling you Kubernetes on top of whatever cloud service they are shilling is the one true way, or some other convoluted mess built on top of a Jenga tower of Cloud Formation and Terraform configuration files. JSON has replaced XML but otherwise, same old.

The one true way was actually Perl CGIs.

Is Convex backend Open Source?

I found only frontend related code https://github.com/get-convex , is backend somewhere there?

Meteor has all of frontend and backend Open Source.

Not yet.

Is this like meteor?

It is a modern alternative to Meteor, Firebase, Supabase and similar, but it should be much easier to work with, especially from React. Unlike Meteor it has a relational DB and data is accessed via server-side functions. It's got some cool properties like automatic realtime updates and ACID transactionality for any server write.

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