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What if serverless meant no backend servers?

subzero.cloud

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Re: What if serverless meant no backend servers?

#111

Post by steelframe »

Once upon a time at a town hall at Google about 7 or 8 years ago where the SVP over GCP was present a man wiser than I asked the question, "In computing the pendulum has already swung a couple of times between client-centric and server-centric. What are we doing to prepare ourselves for the next swing back into client-centric?"

The SVP responded as if the guy asking that question had just stepped out of an alien spacecraft from Alpha Centuri. At the time in that room it seemed incomprehensible to most present how anybody could possibly bask in the glory of the Google infrastructure and then want anything other than that.

Re: What if serverless meant no backend servers?

#112

Post by plagiarist »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #92

I believe what the author is describing is called A Desktop Application . They were these crazy forms of web apps, that ran on a local computer, stored data locally, and didn't use a server. Or a web browser. Legend has it that they used little memory, were fast and snappy, and enabled native integration with all of an operating system's capabilities, widgets, etc, while still allowing a user to completely control wh…

I don't know about this idea. How would I turn this "Java" off when their subscription runs out?

Re: What if serverless meant no backend servers?

#113

Post by desmondl »

Looking at this with an open mind, I'm curious what benefits running SQLite in WebAssembly with a proxied web worker API layer gives compared to using localStorage or something similar.

* Using SQL has clear benefits for writing an application. You can use existing stable tools for performing migrations.

* Using SQLite in a filesystem offers many advantages w.r.t performance and reliability. Do these advantages translate over when using WebAssembly SQLite over OPFS?

* How does SQLite / OPFS performance compare to reading / writing to localstorage?

* From what I know about web workers, the browser thinks it is making http requests to communicate with subzero, while the web worker proxies these requests to a local subzero server. What is the overhead cost with doing this, and what benefits does this give over having the browser communicate directly with SQLite?

* I remember seeing a demo of using [SQLite over HTTP](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sqlite+http) a while back. I wonder if that can be implemented with web workers as an even simpler interface between the web and SQLite and how that affects bundle size...

Re: What if serverless meant no backend servers?

#114

Post by Spivak »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #92

I believe what the author is describing is called A Desktop Application . They were these crazy forms of web apps, that ran on a local computer, stored data locally, and didn't use a server. Or a web browser. Legend has it that they used little memory, were fast and snappy, and enabled native integration with all of an operating system's capabilities, widgets, etc, while still allowing a user to completely control wh…

This is really the fault of the literally zero cooperation between os vendors to make it possible to run non-native apps (i.e. apps that are the same everywhere not an app that's windows-like on Windows and mac-like on Mac) that can look like anything a designer can draw. So the instant someone assembled the bits of course it took off like wildfire even if it's otherwise suboptimal in every way. Someone finally made the thing devs actually want out of a cross-platform sdk instead of yet-another-rigid-widget-toolkit.

"fuck your platform" or less crass "your platform is just one of my delivery vectors" could be the 2015 on mantra for appdev.

Game engines mostly get this right too. You get a rectangle to render everything from scratch and enough abstractions where interacting with the OS directly is a rare occurrence.

Re: What if serverless meant no backend servers?

#115

Post by raybb »

jmull wrote: post #98

I believe what is being proposed is a static site where user data is persisted locally using the WASM sqlite + OPFS. I guess it is also organized like a typical web app, but the app logic and database logic run locally. I was expecting something different because it started with phrases like "no servers at all" and "entirely without any servers", but there's a regular web server serving static files. I'm not a fan of…

Speaking of WASM. Is there a way to run code in the browser that calls endpoints secured with CORS? I tried looking it up recently but no luck. I feel its a pretty big limiter when trying to call out to third parties directly and letting people bring their own API key.

I've been thinking about making a web GUI over gmailctl for easy editing but want to make it very easy to use without hosting and without people sending me their keys.

Re: What if serverless meant no backend servers?

#116

Post by zubairq »

So is this article advocating storing everything in a browser SQLite database and then the SQLite database syncs with another server somewhere else? But to do that doesn’t it need to call a server somewhere. I’m trying to understand as it seems there are still servers here??

Re: What if serverless meant no backend servers?

#117

Post by arccy »

ijhuygft776 wrote: post #110
dspillett wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While a desirable state for users, this could quickly balloon into a nest of support issues for the maintainers due to having many different versions to patch when a security issue or other significant bug becomes apparent, increasing the project's response time to anything important like that. You could try to mitigate this by maintaining only a couple of versions (perhaps preview, current, and LTS similar to Debian…

> While a desirable state for users, isn't users all that matters in the long term?

if your development process is unsustainable, then your users get nothing in the end.

Re: What if serverless meant no backend servers?

#118

Post by ochiba »

zubairq wrote: post #116

So is this article advocating storing everything in a browser SQLite database and then the SQLite database syncs with another server somewhere else? But to do that doesn’t it need to call a server somewhere. I’m trying to understand as it seems there are still servers here??

The server-free architecture described at the end of the article does not seem to involve syncing data to somewhere else — it seems the data would only reside on the user's local device.

Re: What if serverless meant no backend servers?

#119

Post by arccy »

Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #101
ruslan_talpa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in principle yes, i agree but one aspect the desktop apps lose, the distribution model. it's way easier to just say "go to this link" and the app is running (no install step, no central store, no "code signing").

> no "code signing" Other than the looming threat of https requirements.

https doesn't force you to pay taxes to CAs because they got into bed with OSes

Re: What if serverless meant no backend servers?

#120

Post by ochiba »

desmondl wrote: post #113

Looking at this with an open mind, I'm curious what benefits running SQLite in WebAssembly with a proxied web worker API layer gives compared to using localStorage or something similar. * Using SQL has clear benefits for writing an application. You can use existing stable tools for performing migrations. * Using SQLite in a filesystem offers many advantages w.r.t performance and reliability. Do these advantages trans…

> Using SQLite in a filesystem offers many advantages w.r.t performance and reliability. Do these advantages translate over when using WebAssembly SQLite over OPFS?

I would say generally yes. SQLite is known for its performance, and with Wasm SQLite, performance is strongly related to how the file system operations are implemented. There have been some good advances in this area in the last couple of years. My co-founder wrote this blog post which talks about the current state of SQLite on the web and goes into performance optimizations:

https://www.powersync.com/blog/sqlite-persistence-on-the-web

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