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I have had a similar-ish idea floating in my head for a while, which is a library + executor + editor UI for per-app scripting capabilities. Something that wou

by rtpg 4y ago

I have had a similar-ish idea floating in my head for a while, which is a library + executor + editor UI for per-app scripting capabilities. Something that would let people write out basic automation workflows to respond to events, similar to what Zapier or Salesforce offers to its users. There are, of course, halting problem-style issues. I _think_ you could paper over some of that at the description level. But really you want the right kind of hooks into the actual system. A scripting tool that is just "oh but you just hit the API" is way less nice than bespoke components for your own system. And with event systems you have the usual event propogation issues of accidentally causing a massive fan-out of events from some action and causing your sysetm to fall over. But this is really something that someone could write out as a component for other systems and make a lot of business SaaS's automation floors way better. You really do want to offer _something_ to users, though. The users that can write Javascript... well, Zapier lets you write Javascript. Hell, Google Cloud Platform lets you write Javascript in little script blobs, complete with Google Docs-level concurrency. This is a bit weak compared to that.

cheerioty 4y ago
100%. This is literally what we’re working on next right now. We just had to start somewhere and with the thing that enables us to do all the other things. We have developed quite a bit of that already inside our own product (e.g. account linking, an editor + live preview, a UI rendering layer, pre-defined connectors, etc) and are in the process of extracting and productizing this, so it’s all part of Scriptable and it’s broader vision (Extendable)… We refer to these things as the batteries we’re missing right now :)
llamaLord 4y ago
Not to hijack OP's thread, but what you describe is what our end-state plan is for G-script (https://g-script.io/ https://g-script.io/), the underling tooling is literally implementable as ~10 lines of Javascript (5 to implement the back-end "engine", 5 to render the front-end editor). The idea being that any SaaS app could basically bolt it in and then add trigger events that match to their apps business events/entities and allow user to extend the core business logic with their own "Scripts".

by rtpg 4y ago

cheerioty 4y ago

100%. This is literally what we’re working on next right now. We just had to start somewhere and with the thing that enables us to do all the other things. We have developed quite a bit of that already inside our own product (e.g. account linking, an editor + live preview, a UI rendering layer, pre-defined connectors, etc) and are in the process of extracting and productizing this, so it’s all part of Scriptable and it’s broader vision (Extendable)… We refer to these things as the batteries we’re missing right now :)

llamaLord 4y ago

Not to hijack OP's thread, but what you describe is what our end-state plan is for G-script (https://g-script.io/ https://g-script.io/), the underling tooling is literally implementable as ~10 lines of Javascript (5 to implement the back-end "engine", 5 to render the front-end editor). The idea being that any SaaS app could basically bolt it in and then add trigger events that match to their apps business events/entities and allow user to extend the core business logic with their own "Scripts".