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Supabase RLS Alternative

ยท 14 min read
Jiasheng
Co-founder of ZenStack

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A Short History of BaaSโ€‹

In the early days of web and mobile app development, building a backend from scratch was laborious and error-prone. Developers had to manage servers, databases, and infrastructure and ensure scalability while writing the core business logic of their applications. Then came BaaS(Backend-as-a-Service), promising to liberate developers from this burden.

How the "check" Function Helps Keep Your Policies DRY

ยท 6 min read
Yiming
Co-founder of ZenStack

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Among ZenStack's features, the most beloved one is the ability to define access control policies inside the data schema. This ensures that your rules are colocated with the source code, always in sync with the data model, and easy to understand. It arguably provides a superior DX to other solutions like hand-coded authorization logic, or Postgres row-level security.

However, as your application grows more complex, you may find yourself repeating the same policy patterns across multiple models. This post explores one typical pattern of such duplication and demonstrates how the new check() attribute function can help you keep your policies DRY.

Low-Code Backend Solution for Refine.dev Using Prisma and ZenStack

ยท 10 min read
Yiming
Co-founder of ZenStack

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Refine.dev is a very powerful and popular React-based framework for building web apps with less code. It focuses on providing high-level components and hooks to cover common use cases like authentication, authorization, and CRUD. One of the main reasons for its popularity is that it allows easy integration with many different kinds of backend systems via a flexible adapter design.

This post will focus on the most important type of integration: database CRUD. I'll show how easy it is, with the help of Prisma and ZenStack, to turn your database schema into a fully secured API that powers your refine app. You'll see how we start by defining the data schema and access policies, derive an automatic CRUD API from it, and finally integrate with the Refine app via a "Data Provider."

The Many Ways Not to Build an API

ยท 6 min read
Yiming
Co-founder of ZenStack

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Building an API is one of the most important things one learns when getting into backend development. There are many good reasons why the entire industry pays so much attention to this topic - styles, transport, security, extensibility, documentation, testing, etc. A good set of APIs allow your application to work great not only through the UI, but also in headless mode, enabling endless integration opportunities for your users.

End-To-End Polymorphism: From Database to UI, Achieving SOLID Design

ยท 14 min read
Jiasheng
Co-founder of ZenStack

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Polymorphism Is the Key To Open-Closed Principleโ€‹

The three fundamental pillars of Object-Oriented Programming(OOP) are Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism. Polymorphism is likely the least-mentioned concept, possibly because this term is not frequently used in daily life. However, it is actually the most important one because it is the key to achieving compliance with the Open-Closed Principle (OCP) in OOP.

Building an Admin Console With Minimum Code Using React-Admin, Prisma, and Zenstack

ยท 13 min read
Yiming
Co-founder of ZenStack

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Building a customer-facing application is exciting. But it's not much fun when it comes to the admin console part. However, almost every serious app requires some sort of admin console for operation needs. It doesn't need to be slick in design or have blazing-fast performance. The main focus should be reliability, cost-effectiveness, and extensibility.

There are many different types of admin consoles. In this post, we'll discuss the most common ones: those that allow non-technical people to make changes to the database and ensure proper permission management at the same time.