would like to know a bit more about comparisons with other realtime & offline-syncable BAAS like: Meteor, Firebase, AngularFire etc -
As a non-dev, this looks very appealing, but before I start learning I wanted to know more about the strengths/weaknesses compared to others.
Hoodie is Open Source and more like BYOBAAS (Bring Your Own Backend As A Service), you can host it yourself, or pay someone to host it for you. You are not beholden to single company’s VCs.
Meteor is about exposing backend and frontend APIs to the browser. Hoodie hides backend complexity as much as it can. The target audiences are very different. Hoodie aims for more frobtendy/designery types, in the future Hoodie definitely wants to reach non-coders as well.
Firebase and Meteor have likely seen more development time, because Hoodie is supported by a bootstrapped company that works on Hoodie part-time and puts it’s profits into future Hoodie development. That way Hoodie moves slower, but Hoodie won’t be at a crossroads when VC funding runs out, or expected growth isn’t big enough.
As far as I can tell, Hoodie’s offline/sync/p2p story is more solid than any other solutions, but then, I’m heavily biased :)
Hoodie’s focus on clean and simple APIs also makes it more easy for beginners.
Firebase does provide robust retry behavior. It tracks data changes, allows explicit online/offline mode, and you can easily write event handlers for sync errors. It also has what looks to me like a much more complete security model.
yeah, my point here is that Meteor gives full-stack (yuck) developers all they need to build quick apps. Hoodie targets UX/Designers/Code-copy-and-pasters.
Full-tack devs will be incredibly quick with Hoodie, like they would with Meteor (or vice versa), it’s just a fundamental difference in design and implementation.
no worries, and thanks! Actually, there is already at least one app in production running on it for a few months now plus a few MVPs, so if you want to go for it: do it. We're currently working towards the release of 1.0.
Any particular (eg: technical) reason it doesn't support Android but does support iOS? If Android will get there one day I'd certainly be interested, but if it's never coming for some reason I'd probably look elsewhere.
No technical reason, we are just lacking the person-power to tackle Android now. It should be straightforward to port from the iOS and web versions and we’d be super happy if someone would take that on :)
I thought much the same thing. Back in the day getting anything .ie registered was a massive pain, and you could pretty much forget it if you weren't an Irish business or highly motivated individual. They'd even try to impose content restrictions (ie. no adult content)
IIRC it got to the point once that a satirical radio show ran promos for what it claimed was the first porn site on .ie, but the link was actually to a gallery of a disheveled blonde helping to push a car out of a ditch. Which I suppose would count for some people, Rule 34 after all.
Which has nothing to do with hood.ie - overall I'd say it looks interesting, and a great way for a FE dev to build a prototype or v1.0 of a web app. I'd be very nervous about scalability though.
I was thinking that initially, but it looks to be a proxy registration with somebody else acting as the domain holder. The domain holder is 'Paul Campbell', who registered under the category "Discretionary Name" as a Sole Trader. I'm guessing there were some little fibs used to get the registration past the hostmasters... :-)
Well, I work for a registrar. I know practically all the tricks around their silly rules at this point and was more wondering which particular set of tricks you used. :-)
Happy to hear! There are various ways - no matter if you're a developer or not, we're happy if you want to contribute (if you want to contact us for details, see http://hood.ie/#about ). There's also the opportunity of sponsoring (http://hood.ie/sponsoring.html) which is also possible for individuals. And you can of course always help us by spreading the word about Hoodie if you like it, perhaps giving a talk about it, writing a plugin if you want to extend Hoodie's core features (https://github.com/espy/hoodie-plugin-tutorial) or giving us feedback.
Yup :) — We are aiming for the Google Docs sharing model eventually. It is specced out and we are slowly implementing it bottom up based on current use-cases.
I'm more the frontend guy at Hoodie, but what you'll be able to do is to allocate roles to users and based on the roles you can give read/write access down to document level.
If you have a specific scenario in mind, I'm happy to elaborate.
Yes comma but :) — We have a production app, but we are very comfortable running Hoodie in production ourselves, of course. The app has 10k registered users and some decent, but no overwhelming traffic. For similar scenarios, Hoodie is definitely ready, for others, we’d caution and recommend to get in touch with us for a more thorough evaluation.
