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Backlift beta now open, featuring auth, validation and auto refresh

64 points| colevscode | 13 years ago |backlift.com

13 comments

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[+] chefsurfing|13 years ago|reply
Backlift seems like a great tool thank you for taking this step! I was setup in 5 minutes. The writing on the setup docs is straightforward so I think I could pass your link on to "less techy" friends and they would be able to be up and running quickly. The general docs are also well written. I am curious and have two questions: 1. Is the data stored in CouchDB, Mongo or other? and 2. The docs mention "eventually... deploying production websites used by millions." Please can you tell us the eventual date? Also I would like local development but I think I can guess that you guys will not prioritize this as your target users might not make it through the conversion funnel of getting the software setup on their own computers. All-in-all, bravo, I think you are on to something great here.
[+] colevscode|13 years ago|reply
Thanks! The database is mongo. We can't put a date on production yet. Local development is a feature we've thought about a lot. Our servers rely on several third party tools, and ensuring those are available locally would amount to building a package management system, or having a lot of dependencies. We think part of the value proposition of backlift is its minimal installation, and both of those strategies add complexity. We have, however, tried to make backlift work with external build tools. So in theory you could use backlift with something like brunch.io.
[+] iambot|13 years ago|reply
After reading this post, and trying backlift out, which by the way looks Very promising and easy to use (to boot)!

I came across the following bug: https://github.com/backlift/docs/issues/1

Cant wait for it to be resolved so I can give backlift a good go.

[+] tominated|13 years ago|reply
I got a beta invite about a week ago, but after reading how they only want you to use JST templates and such I avoided it. Is this actually the case or is that just the standard template (and documentation) recommendation?
[+] colevscode|13 years ago|reply
Cole from backlift here. It's a temporary limitation. We just haven't integrated other template libraries yet. If you shoot us an email at support at backlift.com with the template library you use, we'll prioritize it.
[+] jongold|13 years ago|reply
Had a quick run through over lunch - looks really promising :)

Going to use it to rapid prototype an app this week - just one thing, any prospect of coffeescript in the pipeline?

[+] cfontes|13 years ago|reply
nice stuff I will try it, but how is it going to work in The future? there is no information about this anywhere... maybe it's free for first adopters :) ?
[+] cfontes|13 years ago|reply
no answer whatsoever, not even a "it will be charged but we don't know how much yet" How can I start to develop something real there without knowing that ?
[+] filipmares|13 years ago|reply
awesome stuff. will try it out over the weekend. would be nice to have some sort of backend storage a la StackMob.
[+] sgrove|13 years ago|reply
Doesn't Backlift have that?

""" Give the database dude a break. Backlift offers a full back-end-as-a-service including:

Data persistence and validation that works with backbone's sync mechanism """

Looks pretty awesome, I'm thinking of playing around with it this weekend as well.

[+] tkahn6|13 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go in terms of explaining to your users how to get a dev environment set up, but:

on OS X you need to run `brew install libyaml` before you install backlift via easy_install

Also the correct flag for easy_install is --upgrade, not --update.

[+] colevscode|13 years ago|reply
Libyaml is not a requirement, the installer will fallback to a pure python yaml library if libyaml isn't available. It does report a rather confusing error, however, before completing the install. If this wasn't the case for you please shoot me an email at support at backlift.com so I can investigate. Thanks for catching the upgrade/update error.