Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust

Post by rustyminnow » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 8:56 PM UTC

jethro_tell wrote: post #27

omn1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. It depends on your definition of serverless. Strictly speaking there is no serverless, there's always some infrastructure somewhere. However the calendar file gets created out of thin air from the GET parameters alone. There is no state or storage involved. Other calendar apps have a backend with a DB; this one doesn't. Now whether that counts as truly serverless is up to you I guess. It's as close as…

serverless is when you save the state but don't keep a machine sitting around when there are no requests, so you'd keep your calendar state in a hosted db and when someone asks for the calendar, a thread spins up and creates the calendar from the state and then disappears until there is another request. This is basically the exact opposite of serverless

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

omn1 wrote: post #33

resoluteteeth wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they mean is that instead of using "serverless" hosting running a rust program to generate ics files you could literally just have a statically hosted html file that uses a couple lines of javascript to generate the ics files within the browser, so there would be no rust or server component at all. You could just host it with github pages. Actually I'm confused why you're saying: > The Rust part is just for the…

Got it. The generator logic is in Rust yes. I could have written it in JavaScript as well but it was just easier for me to do that part in Rust. Should have mentioned that. Of course you could host a static HTML with JS on Github pages, but Github pages also runs on a server. So to answer the original question, yes you do need some server for it unless you make it a command line app.

Post by outworlder » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:12 PM UTC

rustyminnow wrote: post #32

jethro_tell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

serverless is when you save the state but don't keep a machine sitting around when there are no requests, so you'd keep your calendar state in a hosted db and when someone asks for the calendar, a thread spins up and creates the calendar from the state and then disappears until there is another request. This is basically the exact opposite of serverless

> serverless is when you [...] don't keep a machine sitting around when there are no requests FTFY The key part of serverless is that you don't have a server idling around. Whether or not you use a hosted db is not relevant.

Post by adamrezich » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:34 PM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #35

drexlspivey wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can easily run on Cloudflare workers, you don't even need a server

... what do you think those are

Post by omn1 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #37

omn1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it. The generator logic is in Rust yes. I could have written it in JavaScript as well but it was just easier for me to do that part in Rust. Should have mentioned that. Of course you could host a static HTML with JS on Github pages, but Github pages also runs on a server. So to answer the original question, yes you do need some server for it unless you make it a command line app.

You need a browser and a file. In your example you need a server to make the file and and a browser.