9 posts tagged with "webdev"

SQL databases have been powering the web since their inception. The combination of strict schema, ACID transactions, and strong integrity makes it still the best storage choice for many apps even today. Database systems, albeit sounding unfathomable and dull, have been a highly vibrant domain in the past few years. Lots of talents are devoted to it, open source projects are created one after another, companies have been striving to build profitable businesses, and VCs have been making bets on those who look like the next unicorns.

Under the flourishing surface, the new generation of modern SQL databases is renovating this 50-year-old technology and gradually reshaping how we build web applications - what we do with it, how we manage it, and the way we program against it. This series of articles tries to explore this topic from multiple fronts, including:

• #1 Serverless & Edge
• #2 New Ways to Program (this post)
• #3 Integration with Development Flow (coming soon)
• #4 AI Capabilities (coming soon)

Let’s talk about how we program against the database today.

SQL databases have been powering the web since its inception. The combination of strict schema, ACID transactions, and strong integrity makes it still the best storage choice for many apps even today. Although sounding unfathomable and dull, database systems have been a highly vibrant domain in the past few years. Many talents are devoted to it, open source projects are created one after another, companies have been striving to build profitable businesses, and VCs have been making bets on those who look like the next unicorns.

Under the flourishing surface, the new generation of modern SQL databases is renovating this 50-year-old technology and gradually reshaping how we use it to build web applications - what we do with it, how we manage it, and how we program against it. This series of articles tries to explore this topic from multiple fronts, including:

• #1 Serverless & Edge (this post)
• #2 New Ways to Program
• #3 Integration with Development Flow (coming soon)
• #4 AI Capabilities (coming soon)

Let's talk about "Serverless" and "Edge-Ready" today.

Database for storing data; application code for implementing business logic - the distinctions seem straightforward. Yet, after so many years of evolution, modern (relational) databases are quite capable of running "logic" - extensions, stored procedures, triggers, etc.

Django is a popular Python-based web framework. It’s a huge so-called “battery-included” framework covering many aspects of web development: authentication, ORM, forms, admin panels, etc. It’s also a strongly opinionated framework that offers patterns for almost everything you do, making you feel well-guided during development.

What changed for full-stack​

The concept of full-stack development has been around for many years, but its popularity has surged dramatically since 2022. As a consequence, its meaning has also changed.

Web development, especially frontend, is undoubtedly one of the most challenging professions in software development. Its landscape is constantly evolving. Tools and technologies become obsolete and replaced by new ones at an astonishing speed. It has also become a vast field, way beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript. Going back ten years, could you imagine that frontend developers, who use an interpreted language to write code, would need to mess with all kinds of compilation tools in their daily job? Pretty insane, isn't it?

But Rome wasn't built in a day. Let's travel back in time to see how we got here step by step.

Web development's landscape is ever-changing. We started from bare metal machines serving static HTML pages, to the rise of the LAMP stack, then the MEAN stack, and now the JAM stack.

Backend development is difficult for people who come entirely from a frontend background. The languages, frameworks, and tools differ, but more importantly, the frontend and backend systems have very different principles. Fortunately, a new generation of libraries and services is trying to fill the gap and simplify coding a backend by …, not coding it at all.

No, you didn’t read it wrong. It’s PostgREST, not Postgres 😄. Although the naming is prone to misreading and not friendly to search engines, it perfectly reflects what the project does - it adds a RESTful API layer to PostgreSQL. This post is a quick introduction to what it is, how it works, and what kind of scenarios it fits best.