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Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase

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Re: Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase

#43

Post by creativenolo »

jeromechoo wrote: post #23

This is awesome. I built a real time whiteboarding app for teachers over 10 years ago on the backbone of the original Firebase service. It was so fast I was able to build basic collision physics of letter tiles and have their positions sync to multiple clients at once. What a shame to be killed by Google. I haven't had a need for real time databasing since, but this is inspiring me to build another collaborative app.

Did Google kill it?

Re: Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase

#44

Post by SahAssar »

stopachka wrote: post #40
breatheoften wrote: post #25

What's the short summary of how the authorization system works for this? One of the things I find quite nice about firebase is the quite powerful separation between the logic of data retrieval / update and the enforcement of access policy -- if you understand it you can build the prototype on a happy path with barely any authorization enforcement and then add it later and have quite complete confidence that you aren'…

> What's the short summary of how the authorization system works for this? We built a permission system on top of Google's CEL [1]. Every object returned in a query is filtered by a 'view' rule. Similarly, every modification of an object goes through a 'create/update/delete' rule. The docs: https://www.instantdb.com/docs/permissions The experience is similar to Firebase in three ways: 1. Both languages are based on C…

> Every object returned in a query is filtered by a 'view' rule. Similarly, every modification of an object goes through a 'create/update/delete' rule.

Is that efficient for queries that return many rows but each user only has access to a few?

Is there a specific reason to not use something like postgresql RLS that would do the filtering within the database where indexes can help?

Re: Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase

#45

Post by stopachka »

serial_dev wrote: post #38

Do you have clients for Android, iOS, Mac apps, Flutter, Rust? If not, how hard do you think it is to implement a client for an additional language?

The core client SDK is pretty small -- it's about 10K LOC. We want to get the core abstractions right in JS-based environments, than expand. We really like Mitchel Hashimoto's post about how he built Ghostty on different platforms [1]

[1] https://mitchellh.com/writing/zig-and-swiftui

Re: Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase

#46

Post by ashconnor »

jamest wrote: post #7

[Firebase founder] The thing I'm excited about w/Instant is the quad-fecta of offline + real-time + relational queries + open source. The amount of requests we had for relational queries was off-the-charts (and is a hard engineering problem), and, while the Firebase clients are OSS, I failed to open source a reference backend (a longer story). Good luck, Joe, Stopa and team!

I always assumed that an architectural decision had prevented relational queries in Firebase.

It was jarring to find out that indexes are required for every combination of filters your app applies, but then you quickly realize that Firebase solves a particular problem and you're attempted to shoehorn into a problem-space better solved by something like Supabase.

It's not too dissimilar to DynamoDB vs RDB.

Re: Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase

#48

Post by gsala »

IanCal wrote: post #14
FetusP wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what a bouldering app is? As in climbing, like a route checklist type thing?

Yep. Which climbs have you attempted, at what grades. My gym uses griptonite, but it's so slow I feel like it'd be quicker overall to create my own app for logging things. I decided to use instantdb as a backend database and it's working nicely so far.

My gym uses TopLogger. It's not super bad, but it could use a nicer design. Are you making an app for indoor gyms or outdoor boulders? Or both? Sounds good with another alternative in the market.
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