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Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

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Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#21

Post by cbsmith »

JaviSoto wrote: post #9

Absolutely priceless! This is an amazing product, and I can not start to imagine what developers are going to be able to do with this. Very exciting!

I'm missing something. This is just MVC style observer pattern. I get that it is well packaged/productized, but this is the kind of thing that developers have been doing for decades, with standard libraries for most of that time. Doing it with a browser is a bit newer, but ever since WebSockets it has been common place.

A nice product yes, but I wouldn't expect this changes what developers are going to be able to do.

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#24

Post by jchrisa »

equark wrote: post #15

We desperately need a high quality open-source Firebase/Simperium/Spire. A simple, robust, realtime data synchronization layer with libraries for major platforms. These projects all look great, but outsourcing this infrastructure is simply not feasible for lots of projects.

CouchDB might fit the bill here, there are now sync-compatible versions for a few platforms:

Server: http://couchdb.apache.org/

iOS / Objective-C: https://github.com/couchbaselabs/TouchDB-iOS

Android: https://github.com/couchbaselabs/TouchDB-Android

In browser and server-side JavaScript: https://github.com/mikeal/pouchdb

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#25

Post by cloudmike »

brianr wrote: post #22

Pricing is free during the beta period. Simperium team: can you give any guidance on when you'll announce pricing, or roughly what pricing is going to be?

Hey Brian, we know this is really important. Our beta label is mostly for the lack of pricing since the technology itself is production-ready. We're looking for more feedback and we aim to announce pricing soon.

What do you think about Urban Airship's model based on active monthly users? What we like is that the costs are obvious and map clearly to your business.

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#26

Post by alanh »

dtran wrote: post #18

"With Simperium, you own your data - that's important!" Not to take away from some of the great projects featured on HN recently, but statements by Simperium like this make me much happier as a developer and business owner: "We believe the best apps have both a great user experience and unique backend services." . From https://simperium.com/overview/ : It is not a backend-as-a-service. We believe the best apps have b…

Please remove the leading space from your quote.

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#27

Post by brianr »

cloudmike wrote: post #25
brianr wrote: post #22

Pricing is free during the beta period. Simperium team: can you give any guidance on when you'll announce pricing, or roughly what pricing is going to be?

Hey Brian, we know this is really important. Our beta label is mostly for the lack of pricing since the technology itself is production-ready. We're looking for more feedback and we aim to announce pricing soon. What do you think about Urban Airship's model based on active monthly users? What we like is that the costs are obvious and map clearly to your business.

MAU doesn't seem like a good model to me; it's not very well connected to your costs or customers' usage so it creates weird incentives on both sides. And it makes it expensive for an existing product with a large userbase to try out a small simperium-based feature.

You guys are a hosting/infrastructure service, and it's probably for good reason that such services have historically charged based on usage. For you that could be something fairly raw like "GB transferred, GB stored" or something a little more abstract like "pushes" or "versions".

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#28

Post by cloudmike »

brianr wrote: post #27
cloudmike wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Brian, we know this is really important. Our beta label is mostly for the lack of pricing since the technology itself is production-ready. We're looking for more feedback and we aim to announce pricing soon. What do you think about Urban Airship's model based on active monthly users? What we like is that the costs are obvious and map clearly to your business.

MAU doesn't seem like a good model to me; it's not very well connected to your costs or customers' usage so it creates weird incentives on both sides. And it makes it expensive for an existing product with a large userbase to try out a small simperium-based feature. You guys are a hosting/infrastructure service, and it's probably for good reason that such services have historically charged based on usage. For you tha…

Great feedback, thanks.

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#29

Post by gmaster1440 »

Looks awesome, quick question, is it possible to mutate data from a javascript client? In the API reference, all I see for javascript are event listeners. Also, how would a javascript client receive an access token? https://auth.simperium.com/ does not allow cross origin requests.

Re: Show HN: Simperium, a realtime data layer

#30

Post by ecksor »

gmaster1440 wrote: post #29

Looks awesome, quick question, is it possible to mutate data from a javascript client? In the API reference, all I see for javascript are event listeners. Also, how would a javascript client receive an access token? https://auth.simperium.com/ does not allow cross origin requests.

Yes definitely, you can update directly using the bucket.update() method, and pass in an id and the data object. The better way would be to implement the 'local' callback to return the data, then just call bucket.update(id), and the library will call your 'local' method to retrieve the current state for that id. You can read about the 'local' callback here: https://simperium.com/docs/reference/js/#local

For auth, we'll be adding cross-origin support for https://auth.simperium.com, up till now we've been focused on supporting apps with existing backends which generally use the HTTP API to generate auth tokens from their server.

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