colevscode

Sorry about that! I see a few "over quota" errors. Do you have space in your dropbox?

The most inspiring job website I've seen. Makes working a 9/5 look pretty fun!

Awesome work! I love the deploy to github pages feature!

What are those assumptions? What problem do you have related to caching template fragments and rendering?

The question about frameworks in the original poll was worded like this:

Are you using a client-side MV* framework? (Angular.js, Backbone.js, Ember.js etc) If so, which one?

So it's possible that Meteor users didn't feel they could answer. However, it was open ended, so people filled in other frameworks, like Derby.js.

Please see my response to this issue here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6128668

There didn't appear to be a clear relationship between startup size and age in the responses. Many brand new startups had 3 or 4 developers, and several older startups were plugging away with just 2 devs.

You may be right, however, that it's just too early to get an apples/apples comparison between Backbone and Angular.

True, but then you're writing server code. Our platform is intended to help front-end developers / designers avoid writing server code.

We do currently support custom domains. What did you see that makes you think otherwise?

Hi Randall. Thanks for the question. I get asked this a lot. For others that have been waiting to learn more about our future plans before committing to Backlift, thanks for your patience.

We do want developers to stay with us beyond the prototyping phase. I started off building Backlift Data to handle real world application needs like auth, access controls, validation and security. Now that it's in the wild I regularly get requests for features, and we're working quickly to implement those features and expand the circle of applications that Backlift supports. We're lucky that other services like Parse and Kinvey have paved the way, demonstrating that you can ship real products, and build a business, using a BAAS.

But our goal is not to be another Parse. Backlift Data is just one part of Backlift. We see Backlift as a deployment platform primarily, and our goal is to make building client-side apps easier and faster for the majority of developers. And by majority I mean consultants, designers, marketers and students that know HTML, CSS and some Javascript.

Here are some things we're doing to achieve that goal:

1) Limiting the scope of the platform. We don't want your front-end code to be backlift code. You should be able to move off backlift, and onto your own backend by changing a few API URLs. This is hard to do in practice, and many of our performance and workflow features (like our {{$variant}} tag and {{$prefetch}} tag, which we'll announce soon) are backlift specific. But Backlift should not be required for the core functionality of your app.

2) Making migration easier. We currently allow data export and we do want to provide app export functionality so that developers can move onto a different host. Right now we're still working out the best way to accomplish this.

3) Making integration easier. We're working on APIs that will let you tie in other data services easily, such as a proxy API that eliminates much of the pain of CORS and connects your front-end logic to external APIs.

4) Making sharing easier. Right now you can embed a button that will let others launch a new backlift app, based on your template, with a click. We intend to expand on this feature to make it easier to upload and share code, and even make your templates available for a fee.

As for pricing, I hear you. Here's our current plan, but please bear with us because pricing is likely to change. First off, anyone can currently create unlimited free apps on Backlift with temporary randomized URLs. Those URLs are renewable every 14 days. We think this is a good way to offer a sandbox for developers that want to try out different libraries and learn. We also think this provides sufficient obscurity so that backlift apps can be developed in private. When a developer is ready to launch an app publicly, we think there should be an affordable plan, priced to compete with shared hosting options currently on the market. On the other hand if a developer is building several apps, or needs to scale up, we believe they should move to a business plan. So just to put some numbers in here, we're thinking less than $30 per month for the personal tier and closer to $200 per month for the business tier, but again, the specifics will change.

I hope this answers some of your questions. Happy to answer more here or at cole at backlift.com.

We added react to hellojs so you can try it out easily:

https://hellojs.backliftapp.com/search/React

This includes the compiled version, which isn't included by default.

Backlift's analytics dashboard is simple and useful for quick analysis and tuning during a launch. In addition all the code for the dashboard is in the /admin folder, so it can be extended if needed.

1) One of the advantages of Airfoil is that you can significantly change the design and structure of your page, rather than just superficial changes to copy, colors etc. In my opinion it's much easier to make drastic changes directly to the HTML rather then messing around with an in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor. Of course you can also use our variant tags to change what javascript is loaded, drastically effecting the content of single page apps.

2) We rolled out two variants for the headline copy on airfoil.io, and even in our relatively small sample set (less than 2k uniques so far) we've seen a dramatic difference in conversion (25% vs 10%)

3) You can add additional test cases, and change probabilities, by editing the app's config.yml file. The relevant configuration might look like this:

  variants:
    a: 0.2
    b: 0.2
    c: 0.6

Currently you can sign up to be part of our premium plan beta. We'll be rolling out pricing soon.

This seems crazy to me. Right now those Nebraskans are competing with tech workers in other countries for tech jobs. If we bring more of those workers here, then 1) the competition will happen on US soil where we can ensure the playing field is fair and 2) an influx of well-paid immigrants will create more jobs for non tech-workers in support or service industries. Any way you slice it, having more tech workers in america is better than the current trend of sending jobs overseas.

The only folks that might be harmed by this immigration shift are the tech elites here that command sky-high salaries.

Based on the frequency of chat messages I'm receiving, I think the biggest problems have been solved. ;) Thanks for your patience everyone.

This is an example of a partially downloaded app. There should have been a bundle of bootstrap stylesheets pulled from github, which didn't make it.

Backlift has an auth api that it uses to establish a user session. As users create and modify data during their session, backlift checks to ensure that the user has appropriate permissions. More data is available here: http://backlift.github.io/docs/authorization.html#authorizat...

Hi if you're having trouble creating projects, we apologize. We recently moved to a build process that pulls packages directly from Github, and unfortunately that code is acting up. We're working on it.

I love the design. Something about it makes me feel like I'm planning a vacation, rather than a career. Nice work.

Uniqueness validation is built into the collections API. If you attempt to add a model with a duplicate ID you'll get a 400 error. In addition you can specify validation rules in the config.yml file. Some additional info here: http://backlift.github.com/docs/validation.html#validation-r....

As for query parameters on the collections API, we totally agree it's a must and we're working on it.

OP here: Sorry about the broken link to the example app. I let the gun.io guys know. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Wow I hadn't heard of FTB before now. Excited to kick off a server and check it out!

You're correct, Backlift isn't set up to let users run their own backend.

Ok, thanks to Dropbox support it looks like we're back up!

OP here, If you're seeing an "unexpected error" when creating a project, we apologize. We're having an issue with our dropbox worker process. We're working on it.

Cool! I think it's a reasonable assumption for rendr to make, since using "real" URLs is a best practice regardless!

The cool part is that Rendr builds a backbone hierarchy around server generated HTML, attaching the rich interactions after the page has been displayed. Although, if the user starts to interact before that view hierarchy has been constructed, for example by clicking on links, the behavior won't be "rich". (However that would require some fast clicking!)

Speedtest reports: 5 Mb/s upload speed

MEGA reports: 500 B/s upload speed

:/

Yes. The worst you might see is a few seconds of mismatched styling, or an occasional error that would resolve when the next dropbox cycle pushes a refresh. The only deployment operations that involve inter-file dependencies at this time are the minification and concatenation that occur during optimization. And we don't recommend turning on optimization during development-- it does slow things down, and we haven't implemented source mapping yet so you'd have to debug obfuscated code.