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Having been primarily a backend developer for most of my career, I generally view these services with suspicion. But the rate of new entries into this space makes me wonder if one day I'll be considered a luddite for thinking this way.
I have had the same reaction. I am not sure what customer pain these services are addressing. Even if it made prototyping and MVP developing vastly easier, what happens if the product starts to take off? The lock-in seems dramatic, but I could be off-base.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have had the same reaction. I am not sure what customer pain these services are addressing. Even if it made prototyping and MVP developing vastly easier, what happens if the product starts to take off? The lock-in seems dramatic, but I could be off-base.
As a UX Designer and front-end guy a lot of the appeal is being able to build something functional without a lot of help. You are correct about the taking off part. If any of my ideas were to take off then I would need to swap out one of these services for an actual back-end.
Having the examples in the latest javascript frameworks has also been extremely helpful in allowing the students to dig further in.
What you're really are providing is a set of APIs. Perhaps calling it "backend as a service" actually scares people off, as they don't realize that they can be using custom server logic as well, and calling it via CORS from backbone. This is just a bunch of APIs that anyone can use.
I think instead of having a backend, we'll move to an app using a set of APIs provided by other companies (firebase, sendgrid, backlift, etc) and custom APIs that may be necessary.
With javascript and CORS it's finally feasible to call remote functions directly from the cilent, eliminating the need to write boilerplate code for every app.
Having been primarily a backend developer for most of my career, I generally view these services with suspicion. But the rate of new entries into this space makes me wonder if one day I'll be considered a luddite for thinking this way.
I have had the same reaction. I am not sure what customer pain these services are addressing. Even if it made prototyping and MVP developing vastly easier, what happens if the product starts to take off? The lock-in seems dramatic, but I could be off-base.
Does it replace learning all of that server stuff at some point, no, of course not, but it allows us to focus on fewer issues at any given point in the course.
To the lock-in point, I've not seen that in what our students have built. There's a bit of unique code but mostly they're using standard AJAX & JSON techniques.
My own perspective is that Backlift and tools like it have real value for not just training but also for prototyping applications, rapidly evolving MVPs, etc. If something clicks and you've got to scale, great - that's when you invest in the real back-end. But there are also a lot of simple, low volume applications and websites where a back-end as a service tool could well be all that someone needs.
We have been using backlift as a teaching aid for an intro to programming class at the Nashville Software School. It has been a great way to allow the students to deploy code and test api's without the normal burdens of server setup or ssh/ftp. Having the examples in the latest javascript frameworks has also been extremely helpful in allowing the students to dig further in.
Not to disparage this service, but I worry that it's just going to encourage a new generation of folks to never actually learn to actually develop software, and continue the less than great nature of much JS in the wild.