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I'm one of Webscript's founders, and I was pleasantly surprised to see this here. We just launched this morning, and I'm happy to answer any questions.
by smarx 14y ago
I'm one of Webscript's founders, and I was pleasantly surprised to see this here. We just launched this morning, and I'm happy to answer any questions.
- minhajuddin 14y agoHow are you sandboxing users, so that they don't mess with your environment?
- smarx 14y agoMost of the sandboxing just comes from using embedded Lua and only whitelisting a small number of functions. We also do a little process-level isolation to prevent runaway processes.
- minhajuddin 14y agoNice, It would be awesome if one could get full capability of a programming language. I have been planning to build something like this but was stuck because of the sandboxing issue.
- rhizome 14y agoYou could spawn BSD jails, each subject to cpu, ram and disk quotas.
- tarr11 14y agoAgree - wouldn't an infinite loop take down your site?
- tlrobinson 14y agoFrom the sibling comment: "We also do a little process-level isolation to prevent runaway processes."
- smarx 14y agoGive it a try. :-) We kill runaway processes after 10 seconds.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- smarx 14y agoIt's reserved for your account.
- conradev 14y agoWhat makes Webscript better than other BaaS providers that have more advanced functionality available? http://blog.parse.com/2012/09/11/welcoming-cloud-code-to-the-parse-family/ http://blog.parse.com/2012/09/11/welcoming-cloud-code-to-the... https://cloudmine.me/docs/servercode https://cloudmine.me/docs/servercode
- akavel 14y agoHm; to me personally, one advantage is that I immediately understand the idea and usage method of their service, while reading the links you provided I can't grasp what they're trying to communicate, unfortunately. Also, I know Lua and value it very highly, so seeing it mentioned immediately focused my attention. Thirdly, "free" "unlimited" "renewable 7-day" trial sounds great, and $5/month for persistent does too.
- barryhunter 14y agoI agree - the simplicity of the service is great. Can immediately see what it does. For example do those other services come with storage? I can't tell. For parse, it looks like you need to install a command line application. Not useful if your desktop is Windoz. I doubt anyone is going to be building huge applications on webscript.io (yet!) but for simple little things (aka weekend projects) it should work great.
- akavel 14y agoYou say time per each script is limited to 10s, yes? Can I call one webscript from another, for modularisation? And will that "lengthen" the timeout effectively, too? If yes, then still everything is sequential, there's no possibility of parallelism, yes? Is there any kind of versioning of the code, apart from the possiblity to load from github you mentioned on the site?
- smarx 14y agoYou can make HTTP requests, so you can call another script from your script, but the calls are synchronous and won't increase your timeout, so the original script will still get killed after ten seconds. No parallelism. What's the use case you have in mind? We didn't really intend for people to do anything CPU-intensive. No, there's no versioning. EDIT: s/called/killed, thanks
- akavel 14y ago"(...) still get killed (...)" I presume? :) Nothing particular yet, just assessing the possibilities. Also, would it be possible to somehow easily download the scripts? In the Terms, you state: "customer is solely responsible for backing up customer's application and customer content." It should be easy to download content from the `storage` object, but how about the code? Also, it seems I can choose any subdomain for any script, so subdomains are not tied to user by design? What is the meaning of the following sentence in Terms and Conditions: "Customer has, in the case of Content that includes computer code, accurately categorized and/or described the type, nature, uses and effects of the materials, whether requested to do so by Planet Rational or otherwise." Described/categorized where, to whom, in what categories? What materials?
- smarx 14y agoYup, I meant "killed." (Edited, thanks.) We figure that copy/paste is a good enough way to get your scripts out, but if there's demand, it wouldn't be too hard for us to build an export. Once you create a subdomain, you own it, but you can have whichever ones you choose. (There's no overall subdomain for a user... a user can have as many subdomains as he/she wants.) A lawyer wrote the Terms, not me, and I probably shouldn't try to interpret them. If you want to discuss it, send us email (support@webscript.io) and we'll help.
- rmrfrmrf 14y agoYou just launched today? The site has a lot of functionality already! I'm really impressed.
- modeless 14y agoWere you guys inspired by AppJet at all? I'd love to see JavaScript support.
- smarx 14y agoI loved AppJet, and yes, I'd call it an inspiration for what we're doing. A number of people are mentioning JavaScript. We don't have any plans yet, but we're paying attention to the feedback.
- donebizkit 14y agoAmazing! I just want to add my vote for javascript support. I am already invested in javascript for client and server development that having a javascript scripting engine like this would be heaven. Again, great job!
- lbotos 14y agoI'm interested in what you are doing here. What is your ideal customer? What should they expect from the platform and what do you expect it to be used for? -Maybe a potential user who isn't exactly sure what this is doing for me.
- kalid 14y agoI'm going to channel my inner patio11: * Charge whole numbers, not 4.95. No need for the confusion. Makes the service look cheap. * Double or triple the price (to $10-15/month). $5 vs $10 is nothing to the average dev, but it halves the number of people you need to get to ramen profitable. * Have an expensive pro plan ($99 - $299/month). With email support, etc. If nothing else, it makes the less expensive plans more attractive. * Don't "delete" the free scripts. "Archive" them after 7 days [it's a 7-day free trial] and you can get them all back when you upgrade to pro. If someone wants to "abuse" the system by recreating their scripts every 7 days, fine. 99% of devs will be more familiar with javascript than Lua, so I'd greatly encourage supporting that.
- smarx 14y ago* We'd be happy to be proven wrong, but we believe $4.95 converts better than $5. * We'd be happy to charge more. We have nothing to go on yet but intuition, and we think $5 is the right amount. * This is intriguing, but I think we need to find the right value to provide in order to offer something like that. * This is actually what we do.
- tnorthcutt 14y agoYeah, but are you testing those beliefs?
- 10098 14y agoI think you have made a great choice with Lua! I'd love to see Lua replace PHP at some point in the future as a popular choice for web development.
- 10098 14y agoHave you tried experimenting with LuaJIT? If yes, what were the results?
- geon 14y agoPlease stop saying "no servers". Obviously there is a server involved for the script to run on.
- mathewsanders 14y agoThat was what caught my attention - I thought it was running locally in the clients browser or something. Peer-to-peer browser-based apps?!