4 ms·

Do you feel those hosted solutions are worse than rolling your own website? Why stand up your own website and architecture if you can use off the shelf solution

• rgbrgb 5y ago
  For me it's a judgement call based on how easy to integrate the hosted solution is, how much lock-in there is, how much flexibility I think we'll need, and how fast we need to ship. One definite disadvantage is testability (which drives stability and ease of refactoring). I can write an automated end-to-end test that will enter some text into a CMS on my site, hit submit, then verify that a post was published. If the CMS is google sheets, I'm going to violate some terms of service and possibly get a blacklisted IP if I do that. Instead I'm going to mock out a response according to the API contract sheets gives me. If they change the API in a subtle way, it may break. An advantage is that google sheets is probably more robust than my CMS and I'll never be able to look at (or have to fix) their code. Flexibility cuts both ways: I can't add features to sheets. So if there's a field I really need to validate on the client, I'm out of luck. But also nobody is going to ask for that feature because I obviously can't add it, so that may be good assuming there's a workaround.
• pphysch 5y ago
  Yes. The project has a (dynamic) website as one of the requirements so we will be building one anyways. And if the lead gets his way, a multiple additional APIs to interface with the Google apps.