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Kinto – open-source alternative to Firebase and Parse

kinto.readthedocs.org

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Re: Kinto – open-source alternative to Firebase and Parse

#91

Post by cristoph »

aidos wrote: post #12
rbranson wrote: post #8

Isn't one of the main benefits of something like Firebase or Parse that you don't have to run it? It's nice that Kinto packages the stack together and provides plug-and-play APIs, but there's quite a bit of expertise and overhead operating a backend stack in production.

Maybe, but there are others of us who don't use firebase because we can't outsource our datastore like that. It goes both ways.

You can use Parse an Firebase to store sensitive data by applying client side encryption. Of course one of the biggest problem is: how do you query that data since it's encrypted. But lately, there are some start-ups that aim to make encryption searchable. See ZeroDB, CryptDB, IQrypt.- the last one is designed to be used for Parse and Firebase: http://iqrypt.com/docs/Home/

Re: Kinto – open-source alternative to Firebase and Parse

#92

Post by jchrisa »

david-given wrote: post #90
jchrisa wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Couchbase Mobile Sync Gateway tackles fine grained access control head on. Basically you write a function that stripes your data into channels, and manages access on a per channel basis. There are a few things that are challenging to model this way, but for 80% of use cases it's the right simplification. Intro documentation: http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/current/...

Sync Gateway looks very plausible... but having to run an extra server just as access control to the main database? That's so ugh. It also looks like this requires me to annotate each document with ACLs. I was rather hoping to be able to just sync a view, so that changing the database would cause players with changed views to automatically resync. I'm not terribly happy with having to recalculate the views of all pla…

The database speaks a binary database protocol. The Gateway speaks websocket and http.

Access control is managed via channels, and you configure the gateway with a JS function that determines which channels a document belongs to, so you don't ACL annotations, the ACL is determined dynamically by your code at write time.

There's a tiny bit of write amplification as we persist channel membership in an index, but that's to avoid massive read amplification of irrelevant records when clients sync their subset of channels.

Re: Kinto – open-source alternative to Firebase and Parse

#93

Post by jchrisa »

fiatjaf wrote: post #84
jchrisa wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in https://github.com/couchbase/sync_gateway which is the Couchbase Mobile access control and sync layer (compatible with PouchDB etc). It has fine grained access control based on a channel metaphor. And it's also written in Go, so you might be interested in using parts of it. Specifically if you wrap your storage layer in a facade that looks like https://github.com/couchbaselabs/walrus you'll…

Thank you, jchris. As far as I could understand, basically I must implement the Bucket interface[1]? I don't if that will work, since I'm storing things in a somewhat different manner, but it's definitely worth examining. [1]: https://github.com/couchbase/sg-bucket/blob/master/bucket.go

That's right. If you find you enjoy that code... Couchbase is always looking for great engineers!

Re: Kinto – open-source alternative to Firebase and Parse

#94

Post by adolph »

girvo wrote: post #42
jondubois wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of this (assuming this is even true), I can't imagine that a finance company would want to store their data inside something like Firebase - The risk of data theft is too high and the value of the data is also too high. When you store everything in a big centralized system, the risk of that data being compromised increases greatly. Right now, the reason why no one is hacking Firebase is because the data wh…

> hospitals started storing data in Firebase Is health data actually worth that much to hackers? Genuine question.

Apparently Medicare spoofing is a big deal. Basically people pretend to be someone with Medicare and receive medical goods and services.

Re: Kinto – open-source alternative to Firebase and Parse

#95

Post by cquillen »

fiatjaf wrote: post #32

Why not CouchDB + PouchDB? It's offline first and replicates over HTTP. For more fine-grained permissions and other features I'm also developing a small Go database compatible with PouchDB at https://github.com/fiatjaf/summadb I hope it will be able to sync through websockets soon.

Speaking of finer-grained permissions in CouchDB/PouchDB. I'm working on implementing that now in my application. Can filtered replication (server-side) solve this problem?

For an application targeting small-businesses, I'm considering the following setup on the server. Has anyone done this or something similar?

One DB per user and a Company DB. Filtered replication from Company DB to User DBs. Full replication from User DBs to Company DB. All reads/writes/deletes from client (or PouchDB sync) to User DB only

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