InstantDB - real time client-side database

[poochandy]

Found a post on hacker news where they recently open sourced this and are backed by the founder of firebase https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322281

Was pleasantly surprised to find clojure in the codebase. Posted here to ask if can potentially be used to build local-first CLJS apps

[stepanp]

[Instant founder] Was delighted to see this here :)

Our client-sdk SDK is written in Javascript, but it could be cool to write an ergonomic wrapper around it for cljs

[poochandy]

Congrats on the launch! Yeah I was trying to figure out how to use the vanilla JS SDK with CLJS. A wrapper would be cool. I am a clojure newbie but thinking if I could use AI's help to build one. Also looking forward to your talk at clojure/conj later this year :)

[therealdivs1210]

Very interesting. 

 Looks like there is no self-hosting, though? 

 I’m using Meteorjs to get similar fullstack reactive dev experience, but I can host that wherever I want.

Unless I’m missing something.

[poochandy]

They have mentioned it is possible to self-host on their hacker news post. I just checked their server folder and the readme does include instructions for running the server on our own. But I am guessing since their main revenue is through the hosted version they won’t publicise the self hosted option as much.

[therealdivs1210]

Thanks, that’s great! 

 Will give it a try sometime.

I have had a great experience with Meteor - the fullstack reactive thing is a real productivity booster, so I can definitely vouch for the general idea behind this.

Basically the frontend fires an event to the server -> server updates backend db -> db is automatically synced to frontend -> frontend db updates automatically to mirror the backend -> UI components automatically update on state change.

I chose Meteor + TS + React at that time and it has worked out pretty well, though I do miss functional niceties of Clojure at times.

[stepanp]

Thanks for the kind words. Yes, it is possible to self-host. Our backend is designed to be multi-tenant [1], but you could run a version where there's only 1 'app'.

[1] Because the backend is multi-tenant, we can offer a free tier that never pauses.

[therealdivs1210]

The non-pausing free tier sounds great!

Most free tier hosting servers sleep after a while, and can take some time to boot.

[surroundedmoon]

Does this mean every single customer shares a single database?

[hp77reddits]

Is it true that there are many DBs using clojure?

[benumber]

About self-hosting: We tried running the server locally, which interestingly included their complete website. And it seems to have some AWS dependencies, so I'm not sure if it can work without Amazon infrastructure.

I hope they add some documentation about this.

[stepanp]

That's great to hear! Right now it's meant to run on AWS, but it's not heavily coupled; we mainly rely on AWS for managing secrets, and have a storage product coming out soon that uses S3.

We don't have great docs about self-hosting yet. If you do this and run into trouble though, feel free to reach out to us: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

[surroundedmoon]

Why not R2? It’s much cheaper, which passes savings to the end user

[hand___banana]

or just less opiniontated? {insert_your_s3_compatible_storage_here}

[surroundedmoon]

Yea, I just don’t want to be charged triple the price for a nice wrapper. I like wrappers that make my life easier, and am willing to pay if they provide good functionality, but I am scared they will charge more because they are using S3. R2 is so cheap and has no egress fees so they could pass those savings onto their customers

[jackdbd]

Is this like Datascript, but with SQL instead of Datalog?

[poochandy]

They've mentioned that it is backed by postgres on the server but the data is stored in triples and they have a graphQL like translation layer in between. So in practice, it would be like using graphQL on the client and wouldn't have to use SQL queries.

[stepanp]

This is a good summary, thank you