12 ms·

What if serverless meant no backend servers?

120 points by runningamok 3y ago

SnazzyJeff 3y ago
> By now, everyone knows that serverless doesn't actually mean without servers; it just means using someone else's servers. What? Is this some kind of confusing reference to lambda and competing providers? As far as I know most of computing is serverless.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  In my experience when someone says the specific word "serverless" they mean "lambda and competing providers" 100% of the time.
- yegle 3y ago
  This usually refers to the billing model of the computation. Serverless products usually are charging by # of invocations or CPU times, whereas "server-full" products charge you a multiply of "# of servers".
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    The proper term for that is "shared hosting". Serverless is just technobabble.
louwrentius 3y ago
> One morning, as I was contemplating ways to procrastinate on doing marketing for SubZero without feeling guilty, an idea struck me. "I know, I'll engage > in some content marketing... but what do I need for that? Oh, a cool demo > project!" And just like that, I found a way to spend a month doing content > marketing writing code. I absolutely don’t understand the point of this. Just reading the intro, it reads about technology for its own sake, just because you can. But what is the value, what are the downsides?
ugh123 3y ago
What about installation and updating/patching? Or is the intention here to still serve this package of web code, db, etc over the net (via cdn maybe), and then execute locally?
- jstanley 3y ago
  If people want updates they can download them on purpose.
  - znkynz 3y ago
    Sounds like the approach microsoft took pre windows update. That worked well at scale.
    - lpribis 3y ago
      There's a difference between OS core programs and third party apps though.
      - jonathankoren 3y ago
        Please enlighten us what this difference is.
        ctxc 3y ago
        Well if the OS annoys me with "update x available, install and restart in 5 mins?" every 10 mins, I'm more likely to do it and still be using it in 10 years (true story). If an app does that...
- znkynz 3y ago
  What about operational recovery? How does a user of this protect their infomation against device failure / theft / fire ?
  - pmontra 3y ago
chrisweekly 3y ago
Cool ideas and nice writeup. Thanks for sharing!
Izkata 3y ago
Is it just me or is this a recreation of Electron, but without the separate browser instance?
Dalewyn 3y ago
Between yesterday's thread and this thread today, is serverfree going to be the buzzword of the week?
jmbwell 3y ago
Like, just … a program?
- soggybutter 3y ago
  In 2024? What a ridiculous notion
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    How are you supposed to extract value from and control the user??
- mdgrech23 3y ago
  I looked at the example app. It was basically a spreadsheet. To me that's what make the internet special is not only can I share my shit but people can their shit w/ me. Sharing is what makes it special.
- qup 3y ago
  > You might be thinking, "That's just desktop applications," but that's not what I'm referring to.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    Maybe the author should have
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  Right. This whole thing reminds me of that one "men will do literally anything rather than go to therapy" meme, except it's "developers will do literally anything rather than make a desktop app". And yes, I read the author's disclaimer about how this isn't just a desktop app, and no, I'm not persuaded that this is filling a need desktop apps didn't already fill.
  - ruslan_talpa 3y ago
    in principle yes, i agree but one aspect the desktop apps lose, the distribution model. it's way easier to just say "go to this link" and the app is running (no install step, no central store, no "code signing").
ysavir 3y ago
Ahh, yes, render side servering.
- wolpoli 3y ago
  We could just package the nodejs code and v8 engine together and ship them to the browser for execution.
  - poyu 3y ago
    We can also just ship it with a browser?! Oh wait!
    - jerbear4328 3y ago
      I think you are looking for Shadow. https://shadow.goose.icu https://shadow.goose.icu Or just the whole kitchen sink. Why not? http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98 http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98
mjburgess 3y ago
I go to fairly great lengths to do everything in the browser to avoid having to support any backends (for the tools, etc. I make; & hobby project gamedev). It would be a great thing if (perhaps legislation) could break the app-store model, then fully-fledged apps could be distributed as web sites (with their own localstorage, etc.) I wonder if there's some legal way of saying, "the web is critical communication infrastructure and all core comms devices need to support X standards"
- dirtybirdnj 3y ago
  regulatory capture and "lobbying" will prevent this from ever happening. it makes so much sense but it threatens business models standards are great but how can I guarantee 200x YoY return for investors? sounds like an unnecessary capx...
- nefarious_ends 3y ago
  Isn’t this what a PWA is?
ijhuygft776 3y ago
What we need is updates that only include security patches.... FEATURE CHANGES SHOULD BE OPTIONAL. Because all software tend to decrease in quality overtime.
- codepoet80 3y ago
  If you're in the Microsoft world, try out the LTSC flavors (of Windows and Office). Its basically just that -- security updates and patches, no new features. Since switching, my environments have been much more stable, no Windows Updates that ruin my day -- just the stuff I need to stay secure, none of the new crap they're trying to push...
  - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
    Even Office LTSC has to have policy changes applied to bypass some cloud functionality they stuffed in there, mind you.
- dspillett 3y ago
  While a desirable state for users, this could quickly balloon into a nest of support issues for the maintainers due to having many different versions to patch when a security issue or other significant bug becomes apparent, increasing the project's response time to anything important like that. You could try to mitigate this by maintaining only a couple of versions (perhaps preview, current, and LTS similar to Debian's sid/testing/stable) which would work for small projects, but for large ones or those that see fairly rapid development you runt he risk of stable gaining a reputation for being out of date, unless you bump it forward regularly which puts you back at square one with giving people feature updates they may not need.
  - ijhuygft776 3y ago
    > While a desirable state for users, isn't users all that matters in the long term?
    - 3y ago
oneplane 3y ago
"It depends". On one hand, if I were to have the goal to make a bunch of money, and software just happens to be the means to an end, making a gated software portal where I control everything would suit me very well. You get nothing until I get the money, and I only maintain what I want to maintain. (pretty much the model every SaaS has) On the other hand, if I know I have a very small customer base, and everyone is making a lot of money or because of my program, and I don't really care that much about the money above a certain number, I might as well distribute it as a static/stale build. You get a binary, or a virtual machine or something like that, and it just does everything. Maybe if piracy were a concern I would add some sort of hardware dongle, but I would also be aware that it's going to get cracked anyway and the only people that are annoyed/limited by it would be my actual paying customers. On the other more different hand (third hand?): if my program has requirements about robustness, locality or longevity, I would make sure it depends on as few things as possible, make sure that it's documented well enough for future users and administrators to run it on future environments, and perhaps not sell the software in itself as much as I'd sell support. The risk and downside is that specialised and unique software tends to be quite annoying and costly to create while there isn't a lot of telemetry or feedback to figure out what's working well and what isn't, so that would drive up the price significantly. I'd say you're looking at two orders of magnitude vs. a SaaS thing.
- RangerScience 3y ago
  > (third hand?) You might like https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/392/what-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-on-the-gripping-hand https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/392/what-is-the-or... - it's like "grok" tho, only (certain) other nerds will get it. But, it's a nice phrase; IMHO it's less "third hand" and more "third option/perspective that renders the prior two moot".
  - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    Ha. I had the same thought but you beat me to it :-)
  - oneplane 3y ago
    Neat! I completely forgot about that, and it's nice to re-discover the gripping hand.
gvkhna 3y ago
I want this too, there isn’t a great FOSS way to currently do this besides supabase or roll your own unfortunately. For PWA local save/write, try network update, refresh local upon success is the gold standard for data integrity. And for network reading fallback to local cache upon offline is great for UX. I haven’t found good tooling for this yet and i’ve been looking.
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  I haven't worked too hard on this, but wouldn't SQLite work?
  - gvkhna 3y ago
    Yes but it’s a lot of code to maintain data integrity between your local store, app state, and networked store. Sqlite is ideal but indexeddb for the browser could work fine too.
ehutch79 3y ago
If you're accessing a remote host for the DB, there is a backend.
- qup 3y ago
  It's not accessing a remote host for the DB.
christkv 3y ago
Anybody remember Groove Networks. Lotus notes over p2p then bought and killed by Microsoft?. It was pretty amazing for its time.
- musha68k 3y ago
  At least we’ve got Damien Katz & co who kept the idea well and alive by giving us Erlang/OTP based CouchDB; its master-master replication kicking in always felt magical.
jimmar 3y ago
I'm always glad to see people experimenting with different approaches to building and deploying apps. That said, the general idea of this Serverfree approach doesn't appeal to me. On any given day, I'll use 4 different devices. I need my data to synchronize seamlessly. I wouldn't use a program (in-browser or traditionally installed application) unless I can synchronize that data either by storing files in a Dropbox-like program or in the cloud. I don't want to have to remember which computer/browser combination I was working on. Edit: forgot some words
- gamepsys 3y ago
  I often think we should have a separation of concern between storing/syncing data and application code. That syncing app files should be an OS level feature, with many different available data stores, and sync well across different platforms.
  - xmprt 3y ago
    Conflict resolution logic is typically application specific so it would be hard to get something like this working in practice.
    - simultsop 3y ago
      If it is a solo user, latest data would be enough to sync. Asuming the blog post tackles personal need app, single user.
      - LtWorf 3y ago
        What if you were offline for a while?
    - vbezhenar 3y ago
      Do not allow offline mode and make fsync block until server acknowledges write.
      - 3y ago
refulgentis 3y ago
I'm lucky enough to have had tons of time to build something with these values. A huge blocker I didn't grok at the beginning is API keys. Unless the app interacts with 0 services, at all, you need edge functions that essentially just add an API key header to a request from the client. It offends me because I don't want people to have to trust me, but...there isn't anyone who will recommend otherwise. :/
musha68k 3y ago
It is the only way to restore the balance.
pylua 3y ago
What if the schema / view has breaking changes ?
- ruslan_talpa 3y ago
  although naively implemented [1] you write a migration in the new version 1. https://github.com/subzerocloud/my-way-track/blob/main/src/server.ts#L13 https://github.com/subzerocloud/my-way-track/blob/main/src/s...
yellow_lead 3y ago
Tldr: Ship the entire app in the browser. This may sound a bit snarky, but here is a serverfree app for your enjoyment as well: <html><p>serverfree</p></html>
- simultsop 3y ago
  I guess this is the dilema of all programming languages, to port stuff on cross platform with very low to no effort. The content composition method, whether it is markup language or Class.Resource.References, would matter less.
samwillis 3y ago
These ideas are some of the founding principles of "local-first software": https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ As I like to put it - Local-first is the real serverless. Your user's device is the real edge. I think the future of the web needs to be that the server is optional, we need our data (albeit personal or our companies) to be on our own devices. We are all carrying around these massively powerful devices in our pockets, let use that capability rather than offload everything to the cloud. One of the things I find most exciting about local-first (and I'm very fortunate enough to be working on it full time), is the sync tech thats being developed for it. 2024 is I think going to be the year local-first goes mainstream.
- runningamok 3y ago
  Clarification: I'm not the author of the linked post. I read your post some time back and feel it's been an organizing force for developers in this space — great job and thanks for the work you put into it. I often wonder about terminology. What was the reason you chose "local-first" over "offline-first" (or even "serverfree" as in this case)?
  - runningamok 3y ago
    My mistake, I see that post wasn't written by you
  - samwillis 3y ago
    Sadly, I'm not part of Ink and Switch and did not write that post... They are an incredible bunch, as are so many people in the local-first / CRDT space, many I have had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    For me (not the author) "local first" makes it clear that "on device" is a first-class citizen, and the server is an afterthought. "Offline-first" or "server free" sounds much more limiting, like it will be able to limp when offline, but really wants to connect to a server eventually. I also (personally) don't like "serverfree" because servers are good - they're not the problem! It's the "servers you don't and can't control" cloud dependencies that are the issue.
msplurgid 3y ago
this is very close to an inventory control app I built at work (with the exception that eventually when the client is online it will sync data to the server). I've often thought, if I had the time and capability ... take it a step further. No server sync at all. Clients form a peer-to-peer network and sync data between themselves. (perhaps bluetooth or something like Apple's Bonjour etc) Actually something like that, plus an optional server sync when server is available is really even better. I'm thinking specifically of a use case in large warehouses that often have no internet connectivity but in which there are multiple users performing inventory who are duplicating work because they don't know a peer already inventoried a specific area and neither of them can sync to server because no wi-fi. dang even better. something like a bit-torrent swarm with something like an admin certificate for releasing code patches, and user-level certs for syncing app data.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  The trouble with this is discoverability and reducing friction. It all sounds nice in theory until the device suddenly doesn’t want to talk over Bluetooth or your bonjour shares timeout. In 2024 they aren’t foolproof enough to handle constant data interchange, particularly if we are talking about a lot of devices. Not to mention with BT it’s easy to hit radio interference unexpectedly
hosh 3y ago
I am thinking the Willow Protocol would make a good base for local-first. There would be no privileged “backend”, but some peers can provide automated services. https://willowprotocol.org/ https://willowprotocol.org/
Pxtl 3y ago
Imho, good integration with existing file-clouds is a good approach. Then it's just serverless but with helpers to say "Store the config on Google Drive", and you get free sync of your config between devices.
david_allison 3y ago
Offline-first isn't enough. I've done user support with users in the mountains who don't have a reliable internet connection. Being able to say 'don't worry, the app works offline, you can (optionally) sync when you're next in the city' is extremely rewarding, and vital for software to work for these people. ---- Offline-only is not enough either. Ideally users should be able to sync between devices when offline, and have the option to sync to the cloud when online
- npb12 3y ago
  If you haven't come across https://ditto.live https://ditto.live, definitely check it out. They've put a lot of focus on this case.
  - david_allison 3y ago
    Already running it on SQLite, but thanks
_xnmw 3y ago
I was actually thinking of this the other day, but taking it a step further by actually distributing computation such as worker queues in a peer-to-peer fashion.
jkepler 3y ago
So is this basiclly a fully peer-to-peer application, like bittorrent clients? Or something like bisq (https://bisq.network https://bisq.network) when the program runs locally peer to peer and hosts all user data locally, but still pings oracle servers for outside market price data?
jp57 3y ago
I like the idea of a hybrid of client-side software that optionally uses third-party cloud storage for cross-device sync. NetNewsWire, ByWord (markdown editor), and Scrivener are some examples. Older versions of 1Password also had this, but I don't know if it still does anymore. Some of these programs managed this better than others. NetnewsWire and 1Password seemed to just work. Byword and Scrivener had occasional sync conflicts that had to be resolved. In general, though, this seems like a nice system: if you (the user) are subscribed to cloud storage, then you get syncing without paying for an extra service. If not, you can still use the software without syncing.
ironhaven 3y ago
I guess the name “serverless” was already taken ;)
solatic 3y ago
Show me where you store the data. If you store it on your phone, then it's not showing up on your other devices. If you lose or break your phone, then your data is gone. There are very few applications for which that's acceptable - basically just your calculator app. If you don't store it on your phone, then it's stored on some kind of server, somewhere. Do you own and control that server, or does someone else? How does the application consume and update the data?
- forbiddenvoid 3y ago
  The article clearly states that data is stored on the device. That's the exact use case described - where people do not want any of their data stored on a server they don't control. If that's you, and if privacy is important enough to you to want a local-only app, I think you'll find a solution to back up your data. I don't think it's unreasonable to continue producing apps that do not require an internet connection to function and be useful.
- thisislife2 3y ago
  Fair point. To quibble though, I guess you are only thinking of iPhones and iPads. There are other mobile devices with built-in support for sdcards, and even USB drive, that easily allow you to save your data on them or use them to create backup of your data. These features allows the user to have better control of their data.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
I believe what the author is describing is called A Desktop Application. They were these crazy forms of web apps, that ran on a local computer, stored data locally, and didn't use a server. Or a web browser. Legend has it that they used little memory, were fast and snappy, and enabled native integration with all of an operating system's capabilities, widgets, etc, while still allowing a user to completely control what happens with the data the program used. Porting this type of application could take a lot of work! So at some point, somebody invented a programming language called Java, which used a thing called a Virtual Machine, so that one application could run the same way on any computer that could run the Java Virtual Machine. They called this A Portable Desktop Application. Unfortunately, this obscure language was somewhat difficult to use, so this paradigm was abandoned for simpler languages, and with it, so went the idea of A Portable Desktop Application. Decades later, somebody reinvented the idea. But it required a much more limited application platform, running inside a kind of hacked-together document viewer, with a simplistic programming language designed to control how documents were displayed. It took about 1000x as much memory and CPU, but, with addition of about 50 different frameworks and 30 different new custom APIs, you could finally get close to the same functionality as the first solution. Ah, technological progress...
- juunpp 3y ago
  Does the author realize they just re-invented an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a native desktop application?
  - cortesoft 3y ago
    I mean, it is basically Electron
- _factor 3y ago
  It really is mind-boggling the path we’ve taken. If only mobile phones hadn’t had been so slow when running jvm and flash when they first came out, we might be writing java and flash web apps in NodeJF by today.
- PlatinumBench 3y ago
kkfx 3y ago
Mh, a small note: in the very past of IT DocUI was the norm. Actually WebUI are a limited and limiting DocUI, limited by the fact the user can't easy bend it to his/her own needs and desire, limiting because the WebVM underneath, the whole stack is NOT made for end-user programming as classic systems was. Just try to look at a modern Emacs with org-mode and elisp: links. It's a DocUI, with some limits, but far more simpler than a WebApp in a local WebVM. And it's pretty local with full filesystem access and so on. I'm curious how many more DECADES will be needed to reinvent the wheel discovering that classic local DocUIs are far superior and can be networked as we with technically. My own local fast GMail is notmuch-emacs, and it's not one, it's fully integrated and integrable by myself with few SLoC in my desktop. It's not so nice for some aspects not because of the model but because the little development base. If we invest a fraction of the effort put in modern web the classic desktop would outshine any other tech.
hrkucuk 3y ago
I like the author's article but he makes no mention of countless people who tried to popularize similar ideas! Some examples: https://unhosted.org/ https://unhosted.org/ https://nobackend.org/ https://nobackend.org/
jmull 3y ago
I believe what is being proposed is a static site where user data is persisted locally using the WASM sqlite + OPFS. I guess it is also organized like a typical web app, but the app logic and database logic run locally. I was expecting something different because it started with phrases like "no servers at all" and "entirely without any servers", but there's a regular web server serving static files. I'm not a fan of the term "serverfree", though, since there is a web server. Also, the app and database servers from classic web apps continue to exist, albeit in a logical, local form. If this term somehow catches on for this style of app it will just cause endless confusion. I suppose it isn't a lot worse than some existing terms we've gotten used to (like "serverless"), but I'm always going to advocate to not repeat the mistakes of the past.
- raybb 3y ago
  Speaking of WASM. Is there a way to run code in the browser that calls endpoints secured with CORS? I tried looking it up recently but no luck. I feel its a pretty big limiter when trying to call out to third parties directly and letting people bring their own API key. I've been thinking about making a web GUI over gmailctl for easy editing but want to make it very easy to use without hosting and without people sending me their keys.
  - jmull 3y ago
    If I understand correctly, you're talking about making HTTP requests from code running in the browser to a third-party API. Whether you're doing WASM or Javascript, you use fetch() and need to have your CORS ducks in a row. How exactly you call fetch() depends on your toolchain, but anything trying to be general-purpose will expose it somehow.
    - raybb 3y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. I hope that one day there is a way to securely make those kinds of requests in the client side. Until then I'll be using a proxy to strip the cors headers.
steelframe 3y ago
Once upon a time at a town hall at Google about 7 or 8 years ago where the SVP over GCP was present a man wiser than I asked the question, "In computing the pendulum has already swung a couple of times between client-centric and server-centric. What are we doing to prepare ourselves for the next swing back into client-centric?" The SVP responded as if the guy asking that question had just stepped out of an alien spacecraft from Alpha Centuri. At the time in that room it seemed incomprehensible to most present how anybody could possibly bask in the glory of the Google infrastructure and then want anything other than that.
desmondl 3y ago
Looking at this with an open mind, I'm curious what benefits running SQLite in WebAssembly with a proxied web worker API layer gives compared to using localStorage or something similar. * Using SQL has clear benefits for writing an application. You can use existing stable tools for performing migrations. * Using SQLite in a filesystem offers many advantages w.r.t performance and reliability. Do these advantages translate over when using WebAssembly SQLite over OPFS? * How does SQLite / OPFS performance compare to reading / writing to localstorage? * From what I know about web workers, the browser thinks it is making http requests to communicate with subzero, while the web worker proxies these requests to a local subzero server. What is the overhead cost with doing this, and what benefits does this give over having the browser communicate directly with SQLite? * I remember seeing a demo of using [SQLite over HTTP](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sqlite+http https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sqlite+http) a while back. I wonder if that can be implemented with web workers as an even simpler interface between the web and SQLite and how that affects bundle size...
- ochiba 3y ago
  > Using SQLite in a filesystem offers many advantages w.r.t performance and reliability. Do these advantages translate over when using WebAssembly SQLite over OPFS? I would say generally yes. SQLite is known for its performance, and with Wasm SQLite, performance is strongly related to how the file system operations are implemented. There have been some good advances in this area in the last couple of years. My co-founder wrote this blog post which talks about the current state of SQLite on the web and goes into performance optimizations: https://www.powersync.com/blog/sqlite-persistence-on-the-web https://www.powersync.com/blog/sqlite-persistence-on-the-web
- ruslan_talpa 3y ago
  * localStorage is small, volatile, OPFS is big/durable * main thread <-> db vs main thread <-> worker <-> db: - firstly, sqlite with OPFS has to run in a webworker - even if it was possible to run in main thread, this approach allows for a code structure that is similar to a traditional architecture (frontend/backend split) and it's easy to route some request to the web worker while let over request fall through and reach backend server and not needing to worry about that in the "frontend code"
zubairq 3y ago
So is this article advocating storing everything in a browser SQLite database and then the SQLite database syncs with another server somewhere else? But to do that doesn’t it need to call a server somewhere. I’m trying to understand as it seems there are still servers here??
- ochiba 3y ago
  The server-free architecture described at the end of the article does not seem to involve syncing data to somewhere else — it seems the data would only reside on the user's local device.
apapapa 3y ago
Serverless is a bunch of poop until everything is truly P2P.... But even then, you could still argue that your peers are servers
parentheses 3y ago
One of the best benefits of approaches like this: Upgrades don't have to be required. EVER!
yoav 3y ago
Based on severless being a server solution, we should name this client-only solution “clientless”
meiraleal 3y ago
I like the concept and I'm building a similar framework but I think you made some confusion in the implementation? Your server.ts (which uses express) runs in Vite or in a worker (which would require a lot of adaptations/might not even be possible)? If it runs using vite, that's a server. Then the distribution of your app is compromised: or people would run it locally having to start the server or they would need to spin up a server somewhere. How does it become ""serverfree"?

120 points by runningamok 3y ago

> By now, everyone knows that serverless doesn't actually mean without servers; it just means using someone else's servers. What? Is this some kind of confusing reference to lambda and competing providers? As far as I know most of computing is serverless.

Dylan16807 3y ago
In my experience when someone says the specific word "serverless" they mean "lambda and competing providers" 100% of the time.
yegle 3y ago
This usually refers to the billing model of the computation. Serverless products usually are charging by # of invocations or CPU times, whereas "server-full" products charge you a multiply of "# of servers".
- zozbot234 3y ago
  The proper term for that is "shared hosting". Serverless is just technobabble.

louwrentius 3y ago

> One morning, as I was contemplating ways to procrastinate on doing marketing for SubZero without feeling guilty, an idea struck me. "I know, I'll engage > in some content marketing... but what do I need for that? Oh, a cool demo > project!" And just like that, I found a way to spend a month doing content > marketing writing code. I absolutely don’t understand the point of this. Just reading the intro, it reads about technology for its own sake, just because you can. But what is the value, what are the downsides?

ugh123 3y ago

What about installation and updating/patching? Or is the intention here to still serve this package of web code, db, etc over the net (via cdn maybe), and then execute locally?

jstanley 3y ago
If people want updates they can download them on purpose.
- znkynz 3y ago
  Sounds like the approach microsoft took pre windows update. That worked well at scale.
  - lpribis 3y ago
    There's a difference between OS core programs and third party apps though.
    - jonathankoren 3y ago
      Please enlighten us what this difference is.
      - ctxc 3y ago
        Well if the OS annoys me with "update x available, install and restart in 5 mins?" every 10 mins, I'm more likely to do it and still be using it in 10 years (true story). If an app does that...
znkynz 3y ago
What about operational recovery? How does a user of this protect their infomation against device failure / theft / fire ?
- pmontra 3y ago

chrisweekly 3y ago

Cool ideas and nice writeup. Thanks for sharing!

Izkata 3y ago

Is it just me or is this a recreation of Electron, but without the separate browser instance?

Dalewyn 3y ago

Between yesterday's thread and this thread today, is serverfree going to be the buzzword of the week?

jmbwell 3y ago

Like, just … a program?

soggybutter 3y ago
In 2024? What a ridiculous notion
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  How are you supposed to extract value from and control the user??
mdgrech23 3y ago
I looked at the example app. It was basically a spreadsheet. To me that's what make the internet special is not only can I share my shit but people can their shit w/ me. Sharing is what makes it special.
qup 3y ago
> You might be thinking, "That's just desktop applications," but that's not what I'm referring to.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  Maybe the author should have
bigstrat2003 3y ago
Right. This whole thing reminds me of that one "men will do literally anything rather than go to therapy" meme, except it's "developers will do literally anything rather than make a desktop app". And yes, I read the author's disclaimer about how this isn't just a desktop app, and no, I'm not persuaded that this is filling a need desktop apps didn't already fill.
- ruslan_talpa 3y ago
  in principle yes, i agree but one aspect the desktop apps lose, the distribution model. it's way easier to just say "go to this link" and the app is running (no install step, no central store, no "code signing").

ysavir 3y ago

Ahh, yes, render side servering.

wolpoli 3y ago
We could just package the nodejs code and v8 engine together and ship them to the browser for execution.
- poyu 3y ago
  We can also just ship it with a browser?! Oh wait!
  - jerbear4328 3y ago
    I think you are looking for Shadow. https://shadow.goose.icu https://shadow.goose.icu Or just the whole kitchen sink. Why not? http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98 http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

mjburgess 3y ago

I go to fairly great lengths to do everything in the browser to avoid having to support any backends (for the tools, etc. I make; & hobby project gamedev). It would be a great thing if (perhaps legislation) could break the app-store model, then fully-fledged apps could be distributed as web sites (with their own localstorage, etc.) I wonder if there's some legal way of saying, "the web is critical communication infrastructure and all core comms devices need to support X standards"

dirtybirdnj 3y ago
regulatory capture and "lobbying" will prevent this from ever happening. it makes so much sense but it threatens business models standards are great but how can I guarantee 200x YoY return for investors? sounds like an unnecessary capx...
nefarious_ends 3y ago
Isn’t this what a PWA is?

ijhuygft776 3y ago

What we need is updates that only include security patches.... FEATURE CHANGES SHOULD BE OPTIONAL. Because all software tend to decrease in quality overtime.

codepoet80 3y ago
If you're in the Microsoft world, try out the LTSC flavors (of Windows and Office). Its basically just that -- security updates and patches, no new features. Since switching, my environments have been much more stable, no Windows Updates that ruin my day -- just the stuff I need to stay secure, none of the new crap they're trying to push...
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  Even Office LTSC has to have policy changes applied to bypass some cloud functionality they stuffed in there, mind you.
dspillett 3y ago
While a desirable state for users, this could quickly balloon into a nest of support issues for the maintainers due to having many different versions to patch when a security issue or other significant bug becomes apparent, increasing the project's response time to anything important like that. You could try to mitigate this by maintaining only a couple of versions (perhaps preview, current, and LTS similar to Debian's sid/testing/stable) which would work for small projects, but for large ones or those that see fairly rapid development you runt he risk of stable gaining a reputation for being out of date, unless you bump it forward regularly which puts you back at square one with giving people feature updates they may not need.
- ijhuygft776 3y ago
  > While a desirable state for users, isn't users all that matters in the long term?
  - 3y ago

oneplane 3y ago

"It depends". On one hand, if I were to have the goal to make a bunch of money, and software just happens to be the means to an end, making a gated software portal where I control everything would suit me very well. You get nothing until I get the money, and I only maintain what I want to maintain. (pretty much the model every SaaS has) On the other hand, if I know I have a very small customer base, and everyone is making a lot of money or because of my program, and I don't really care that much about the money above a certain number, I might as well distribute it as a static/stale build. You get a binary, or a virtual machine or something like that, and it just does everything. Maybe if piracy were a concern I would add some sort of hardware dongle, but I would also be aware that it's going to get cracked anyway and the only people that are annoyed/limited by it would be my actual paying customers. On the other more different hand (third hand?): if my program has requirements about robustness, locality or longevity, I would make sure it depends on as few things as possible, make sure that it's documented well enough for future users and administrators to run it on future environments, and perhaps not sell the software in itself as much as I'd sell support. The risk and downside is that specialised and unique software tends to be quite annoying and costly to create while there isn't a lot of telemetry or feedback to figure out what's working well and what isn't, so that would drive up the price significantly. I'd say you're looking at two orders of magnitude vs. a SaaS thing.

RangerScience 3y ago
> (third hand?) You might like https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/392/what-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-on-the-gripping-hand https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/392/what-is-the-or... - it's like "grok" tho, only (certain) other nerds will get it. But, it's a nice phrase; IMHO it's less "third hand" and more "third option/perspective that renders the prior two moot".
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  Ha. I had the same thought but you beat me to it :-)
- oneplane 3y ago
  Neat! I completely forgot about that, and it's nice to re-discover the gripping hand.

gvkhna 3y ago

I want this too, there isn’t a great FOSS way to currently do this besides supabase or roll your own unfortunately. For PWA local save/write, try network update, refresh local upon success is the gold standard for data integrity. And for network reading fallback to local cache upon offline is great for UX. I haven’t found good tooling for this yet and i’ve been looking.

myaccountonhn 3y ago
I haven't worked too hard on this, but wouldn't SQLite work?
- gvkhna 3y ago
  Yes but it’s a lot of code to maintain data integrity between your local store, app state, and networked store. Sqlite is ideal but indexeddb for the browser could work fine too.

ehutch79 3y ago

If you're accessing a remote host for the DB, there is a backend.

qup 3y ago
It's not accessing a remote host for the DB.

christkv 3y ago

Anybody remember Groove Networks. Lotus notes over p2p then bought and killed by Microsoft?. It was pretty amazing for its time.

musha68k 3y ago
At least we’ve got Damien Katz & co who kept the idea well and alive by giving us Erlang/OTP based CouchDB; its master-master replication kicking in always felt magical.

jimmar 3y ago

I'm always glad to see people experimenting with different approaches to building and deploying apps. That said, the general idea of this Serverfree approach doesn't appeal to me. On any given day, I'll use 4 different devices. I need my data to synchronize seamlessly. I wouldn't use a program (in-browser or traditionally installed application) unless I can synchronize that data either by storing files in a Dropbox-like program or in the cloud. I don't want to have to remember which computer/browser combination I was working on. Edit: forgot some words

gamepsys 3y ago
I often think we should have a separation of concern between storing/syncing data and application code. That syncing app files should be an OS level feature, with many different available data stores, and sync well across different platforms.
- xmprt 3y ago
  Conflict resolution logic is typically application specific so it would be hard to get something like this working in practice.
  - simultsop 3y ago
    If it is a solo user, latest data would be enough to sync. Asuming the blog post tackles personal need app, single user.
    - LtWorf 3y ago
      What if you were offline for a while?
  - vbezhenar 3y ago
    Do not allow offline mode and make fsync block until server acknowledges write.
    - 3y ago

refulgentis 3y ago

I'm lucky enough to have had tons of time to build something with these values. A huge blocker I didn't grok at the beginning is API keys. Unless the app interacts with 0 services, at all, you need edge functions that essentially just add an API key header to a request from the client. It offends me because I don't want people to have to trust me, but...there isn't anyone who will recommend otherwise. :/

musha68k 3y ago

It is the only way to restore the balance.

pylua 3y ago

What if the schema / view has breaking changes ?

ruslan_talpa 3y ago
although naively implemented [1] you write a migration in the new version 1. https://github.com/subzerocloud/my-way-track/blob/main/src/server.ts#L13 https://github.com/subzerocloud/my-way-track/blob/main/src/s...

yellow_lead 3y ago

Tldr: Ship the entire app in the browser. This may sound a bit snarky, but here is a serverfree app for your enjoyment as well: <html><p>serverfree</p></html>

simultsop 3y ago
I guess this is the dilema of all programming languages, to port stuff on cross platform with very low to no effort. The content composition method, whether it is markup language or Class.Resource.References, would matter less.

samwillis 3y ago

These ideas are some of the founding principles of "local-first software": https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ As I like to put it - Local-first is the real serverless. Your user's device is the real edge. I think the future of the web needs to be that the server is optional, we need our data (albeit personal or our companies) to be on our own devices. We are all carrying around these massively powerful devices in our pockets, let use that capability rather than offload everything to the cloud. One of the things I find most exciting about local-first (and I'm very fortunate enough to be working on it full time), is the sync tech thats being developed for it. 2024 is I think going to be the year local-first goes mainstream.

runningamok 3y ago
Clarification: I'm not the author of the linked post. I read your post some time back and feel it's been an organizing force for developers in this space — great job and thanks for the work you put into it. I often wonder about terminology. What was the reason you chose "local-first" over "offline-first" (or even "serverfree" as in this case)?
- runningamok 3y ago
  My mistake, I see that post wasn't written by you
- samwillis 3y ago
  Sadly, I'm not part of Ink and Switch and did not write that post... They are an incredible bunch, as are so many people in the local-first / CRDT space, many I have had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with.
- bombcar 3y ago
  For me (not the author) "local first" makes it clear that "on device" is a first-class citizen, and the server is an afterthought. "Offline-first" or "server free" sounds much more limiting, like it will be able to limp when offline, but really wants to connect to a server eventually. I also (personally) don't like "serverfree" because servers are good - they're not the problem! It's the "servers you don't and can't control" cloud dependencies that are the issue.

msplurgid 3y ago

this is very close to an inventory control app I built at work (with the exception that eventually when the client is online it will sync data to the server). I've often thought, if I had the time and capability ... take it a step further. No server sync at all. Clients form a peer-to-peer network and sync data between themselves. (perhaps bluetooth or something like Apple's Bonjour etc) Actually something like that, plus an optional server sync when server is available is really even better. I'm thinking specifically of a use case in large warehouses that often have no internet connectivity but in which there are multiple users performing inventory who are duplicating work because they don't know a peer already inventoried a specific area and neither of them can sync to server because no wi-fi. dang even better. something like a bit-torrent swarm with something like an admin certificate for releasing code patches, and user-level certs for syncing app data.

no_wizard 3y ago
The trouble with this is discoverability and reducing friction. It all sounds nice in theory until the device suddenly doesn’t want to talk over Bluetooth or your bonjour shares timeout. In 2024 they aren’t foolproof enough to handle constant data interchange, particularly if we are talking about a lot of devices. Not to mention with BT it’s easy to hit radio interference unexpectedly

hosh 3y ago

I am thinking the Willow Protocol would make a good base for local-first. There would be no privileged “backend”, but some peers can provide automated services. https://willowprotocol.org/ https://willowprotocol.org/

Pxtl 3y ago

Imho, good integration with existing file-clouds is a good approach. Then it's just serverless but with helpers to say "Store the config on Google Drive", and you get free sync of your config between devices.

david_allison 3y ago

Offline-first isn't enough. I've done user support with users in the mountains who don't have a reliable internet connection. Being able to say 'don't worry, the app works offline, you can (optionally) sync when you're next in the city' is extremely rewarding, and vital for software to work for these people. ---- Offline-only is not enough either. Ideally users should be able to sync between devices when offline, and have the option to sync to the cloud when online

npb12 3y ago
If you haven't come across https://ditto.live https://ditto.live, definitely check it out. They've put a lot of focus on this case.
- david_allison 3y ago
  Already running it on SQLite, but thanks

_xnmw 3y ago

I was actually thinking of this the other day, but taking it a step further by actually distributing computation such as worker queues in a peer-to-peer fashion.

jkepler 3y ago

So is this basiclly a fully peer-to-peer application, like bittorrent clients? Or something like bisq (https://bisq.network https://bisq.network) when the program runs locally peer to peer and hosts all user data locally, but still pings oracle servers for outside market price data?

jp57 3y ago

I like the idea of a hybrid of client-side software that optionally uses third-party cloud storage for cross-device sync. NetNewsWire, ByWord (markdown editor), and Scrivener are some examples. Older versions of 1Password also had this, but I don't know if it still does anymore. Some of these programs managed this better than others. NetnewsWire and 1Password seemed to just work. Byword and Scrivener had occasional sync conflicts that had to be resolved. In general, though, this seems like a nice system: if you (the user) are subscribed to cloud storage, then you get syncing without paying for an extra service. If not, you can still use the software without syncing.

ironhaven 3y ago

I guess the name “serverless” was already taken ;)

solatic 3y ago

Show me where you store the data. If you store it on your phone, then it's not showing up on your other devices. If you lose or break your phone, then your data is gone. There are very few applications for which that's acceptable - basically just your calculator app. If you don't store it on your phone, then it's stored on some kind of server, somewhere. Do you own and control that server, or does someone else? How does the application consume and update the data?

forbiddenvoid 3y ago
The article clearly states that data is stored on the device. That's the exact use case described - where people do not want any of their data stored on a server they don't control. If that's you, and if privacy is important enough to you to want a local-only app, I think you'll find a solution to back up your data. I don't think it's unreasonable to continue producing apps that do not require an internet connection to function and be useful.
thisislife2 3y ago
Fair point. To quibble though, I guess you are only thinking of iPhones and iPads. There are other mobile devices with built-in support for sdcards, and even USB drive, that easily allow you to save your data on them or use them to create backup of your data. These features allows the user to have better control of their data.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

I believe what the author is describing is called A Desktop Application. They were these crazy forms of web apps, that ran on a local computer, stored data locally, and didn't use a server. Or a web browser. Legend has it that they used little memory, were fast and snappy, and enabled native integration with all of an operating system's capabilities, widgets, etc, while still allowing a user to completely control what happens with the data the program used. Porting this type of application could take a lot of work! So at some point, somebody invented a programming language called Java, which used a thing called a Virtual Machine, so that one application could run the same way on any computer that could run the Java Virtual Machine. They called this A Portable Desktop Application. Unfortunately, this obscure language was somewhat difficult to use, so this paradigm was abandoned for simpler languages, and with it, so went the idea of A Portable Desktop Application. Decades later, somebody reinvented the idea. But it required a much more limited application platform, running inside a kind of hacked-together document viewer, with a simplistic programming language designed to control how documents were displayed. It took about 1000x as much memory and CPU, but, with addition of about 50 different frameworks and 30 different new custom APIs, you could finally get close to the same functionality as the first solution. Ah, technological progress...

juunpp 3y ago
Does the author realize they just re-invented an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a native desktop application?
- cortesoft 3y ago
  I mean, it is basically Electron
_factor 3y ago
It really is mind-boggling the path we’ve taken. If only mobile phones hadn’t had been so slow when running jvm and flash when they first came out, we might be writing java and flash web apps in NodeJF by today.
PlatinumBench 3y ago

kkfx 3y ago

Mh, a small note: in the very past of IT DocUI was the norm. Actually WebUI are a limited and limiting DocUI, limited by the fact the user can't easy bend it to his/her own needs and desire, limiting because the WebVM underneath, the whole stack is NOT made for end-user programming as classic systems was. Just try to look at a modern Emacs with org-mode and elisp: links. It's a DocUI, with some limits, but far more simpler than a WebApp in a local WebVM. And it's pretty local with full filesystem access and so on. I'm curious how many more DECADES will be needed to reinvent the wheel discovering that classic local DocUIs are far superior and can be networked as we with technically. My own local fast GMail is notmuch-emacs, and it's not one, it's fully integrated and integrable by myself with few SLoC in my desktop. It's not so nice for some aspects not because of the model but because the little development base. If we invest a fraction of the effort put in modern web the classic desktop would outshine any other tech.

hrkucuk 3y ago

I like the author's article but he makes no mention of countless people who tried to popularize similar ideas! Some examples: https://unhosted.org/ https://unhosted.org/ https://nobackend.org/ https://nobackend.org/

jmull 3y ago

I believe what is being proposed is a static site where user data is persisted locally using the WASM sqlite + OPFS. I guess it is also organized like a typical web app, but the app logic and database logic run locally. I was expecting something different because it started with phrases like "no servers at all" and "entirely without any servers", but there's a regular web server serving static files. I'm not a fan of the term "serverfree", though, since there is a web server. Also, the app and database servers from classic web apps continue to exist, albeit in a logical, local form. If this term somehow catches on for this style of app it will just cause endless confusion. I suppose it isn't a lot worse than some existing terms we've gotten used to (like "serverless"), but I'm always going to advocate to not repeat the mistakes of the past.

raybb 3y ago
Speaking of WASM. Is there a way to run code in the browser that calls endpoints secured with CORS? I tried looking it up recently but no luck. I feel its a pretty big limiter when trying to call out to third parties directly and letting people bring their own API key. I've been thinking about making a web GUI over gmailctl for easy editing but want to make it very easy to use without hosting and without people sending me their keys.
- jmull 3y ago
  If I understand correctly, you're talking about making HTTP requests from code running in the browser to a third-party API. Whether you're doing WASM or Javascript, you use fetch() and need to have your CORS ducks in a row. How exactly you call fetch() depends on your toolchain, but anything trying to be general-purpose will expose it somehow.
  - raybb 3y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I hope that one day there is a way to securely make those kinds of requests in the client side. Until then I'll be using a proxy to strip the cors headers.

steelframe 3y ago

Once upon a time at a town hall at Google about 7 or 8 years ago where the SVP over GCP was present a man wiser than I asked the question, "In computing the pendulum has already swung a couple of times between client-centric and server-centric. What are we doing to prepare ourselves for the next swing back into client-centric?" The SVP responded as if the guy asking that question had just stepped out of an alien spacecraft from Alpha Centuri. At the time in that room it seemed incomprehensible to most present how anybody could possibly bask in the glory of the Google infrastructure and then want anything other than that.

desmondl 3y ago

Looking at this with an open mind, I'm curious what benefits running SQLite in WebAssembly with a proxied web worker API layer gives compared to using localStorage or something similar. * Using SQL has clear benefits for writing an application. You can use existing stable tools for performing migrations. * Using SQLite in a filesystem offers many advantages w.r.t performance and reliability. Do these advantages translate over when using WebAssembly SQLite over OPFS? * How does SQLite / OPFS performance compare to reading / writing to localstorage? * From what I know about web workers, the browser thinks it is making http requests to communicate with subzero, while the web worker proxies these requests to a local subzero server. What is the overhead cost with doing this, and what benefits does this give over having the browser communicate directly with SQLite? * I remember seeing a demo of using [SQLite over HTTP](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sqlite+http https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sqlite+http) a while back. I wonder if that can be implemented with web workers as an even simpler interface between the web and SQLite and how that affects bundle size...

ochiba 3y ago
> Using SQLite in a filesystem offers many advantages w.r.t performance and reliability. Do these advantages translate over when using WebAssembly SQLite over OPFS? I would say generally yes. SQLite is known for its performance, and with Wasm SQLite, performance is strongly related to how the file system operations are implemented. There have been some good advances in this area in the last couple of years. My co-founder wrote this blog post which talks about the current state of SQLite on the web and goes into performance optimizations: https://www.powersync.com/blog/sqlite-persistence-on-the-web https://www.powersync.com/blog/sqlite-persistence-on-the-web
ruslan_talpa 3y ago
* localStorage is small, volatile, OPFS is big/durable * main thread <-> db vs main thread <-> worker <-> db: - firstly, sqlite with OPFS has to run in a webworker - even if it was possible to run in main thread, this approach allows for a code structure that is similar to a traditional architecture (frontend/backend split) and it's easy to route some request to the web worker while let over request fall through and reach backend server and not needing to worry about that in the "frontend code"

zubairq 3y ago

So is this article advocating storing everything in a browser SQLite database and then the SQLite database syncs with another server somewhere else? But to do that doesn’t it need to call a server somewhere. I’m trying to understand as it seems there are still servers here??

ochiba 3y ago
The server-free architecture described at the end of the article does not seem to involve syncing data to somewhere else — it seems the data would only reside on the user's local device.

apapapa 3y ago

Serverless is a bunch of poop until everything is truly P2P.... But even then, you could still argue that your peers are servers

parentheses 3y ago

One of the best benefits of approaches like this: Upgrades don't have to be required. EVER!

yoav 3y ago

Based on severless being a server solution, we should name this client-only solution “clientless”

meiraleal 3y ago

I like the concept and I'm building a similar framework but I think you made some confusion in the implementation? Your server.ts (which uses express) runs in Vite or in a worker (which would require a lot of adaptations/might not even be possible)? If it runs using vite, that's a server. Then the distribution of your app is compromised: or people would run it locally having to start the server or they would need to spin up a server somewhere. How does it become ""serverfree"?