Show HN: Scaphold.io – A full GraphQL back end in under 5 minutes

https://scaphold.io

by vning93 • 10 years ago

61 19 10 years ago

scaphold.io

mparis5• 10 years ago

Hey guys,

This is Michael from the Scaphold team.

We are excited to officially launch today and would love to hear any and all feedback on the platform.

A little about us. We are a member of this summer's YC Fellowship class and are pumped to be moving full steam ahead with Scaphold. Over the past few years, my co-founder and I have built numerous REST APIs to back services ranging social music apps to community book swapping programs. Each time, we found that we were running into many of the same problems and building much of the same thing over and over again. We used REST because we didn't know any other way, but something was definitely left to be desired. Last year, after reading a HN post on this little thing called GraphQL, we knew this was the future. A few months later, we set out to build the world's most powerful GraphQL-as-a-Service platform and today we are sharing it with you.

Thank you HN for the support and we can't wait to see what you build!

PS. If you are an experienced React or Relay dev we would love to hear from you as your feedback would invaluable to us. You can connect on our Slack page here (https://scapholdslackin.herokuapp.com) or via our the chat tool on our homepage.

ModernMech• 10 years ago

On your docs page you write "We think it's probably easier to show you. Watch us make HackerNews in under 10 minutes!" but you didn't embed the video. Could we get a link?

mparis5• 10 years ago

Yes absolutely! We will update the docs asap! You can find the video on the home page as well as on youtube here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ8pnYd6jPQ).

We were actually able to get everything started in under 5 minutes!

syrusakbary2• 10 years ago

Congrats on the launch! It's great seeing how fast GraphQL community is growing/evolving. What language are you using on the backend?

mparis5• 10 years ago

We're mostly a javascript shop and run on node.js with babel so we can leverage all the modern goodies of EMCA 2015!

wille92• 10 years ago

Congrats to Michael and Vince, looks great. Are there any other GraphQL backend services out there, and if so how will you guys differentiate?

vning932• 10 years ago

Thanks for the support!

There are only a couple in very nascent stages right now. We see this as a good sign since it means that people are in need of more tooling and platforms around such a new technology. Of the other platforms that we're most concerned about, one has built a CLI and another one that's similar to ours hasn't launched quite yet. We differentiate by building a platform that's robust, has end-to-end services like analytics, integrations, and permissions, while still maintaining a level of ease and familiarity through a web interface.

bunkat• 10 years ago

Has anybody figured out how you do caching and cache invalidation on the client with GraphQL if every page is requesting slightly different forms of the same data? Seems like it is a bigger win to just download the 400 friends once and let the pages use the data they need instead of downloading the 400 friends 10 different ways.

My particular app is read heavy and so I can eliminate the majority of the server calls altogether via caching. While GraphQL would help me fetch only the data I need on each page and decouple the data access, I don't see how I reuse objects across pages without interrogating the GraphQL queries. I haven't given it all that much thought though so maybe I'm missing something.

syrusakbary2• 10 years ago

I think is worth to take a look into Facebook's dataloader. Instead of having a caching mechanism (likve Varnish) in your HTTP layer, you could have it in your GraphQL backend.

https://github.com/facebook/dataloader

mparis5• 10 years ago

Great suggestion. We are currently working on getting this setup on our side!

mparis5• 10 years ago

Facebook's Relay.js implements a pretty ingenious caching layer that is designed to work with GraphQL. It might be worth a look (https://facebook.github.io/relay/).

jlogzz• 10 years ago

Congrats, it looks awesome :)

seanpcheng• 10 years ago

This is great guys! Loving how easy it is to get it started. Keep up the good work!

rakcity• 10 years ago

congrats on this guys. are there any scalability issues that could arise as the apps you support grow larger?

vning932• 10 years ago

We're currently hosted on AWS, and we'll scale your instances as far as you need them. There are a few pricing tiers in which for the enterprise level, we'll give you the option of having custom dedicated servers that fit your requirements.

junsup• 10 years ago

keep slaying. this is awesome.

akjsdnfajk• 10 years ago

Good stuff

chrdlu• 10 years ago

Awesome product! Technology continues to make it easier for people to program and prototype. Keep up the good work!

andrewbalitsky• 10 years ago

Michael this is awesome

Show HN: Scaphold.io – A full GraphQL back end in under 5 minutes

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