datasette.io VS Papercups

Opened an issue exploring alternatives here: https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io/issues/109

I decided to just drop "any size" but keep "any shape".

Here's an example from one of my projects: https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io/blob/main/.github/workflows/deploy.yml

I've come around to almost the opposite approach.

I pull all of the data I can get my hands on (from Twitter, GitHub, Swarm, Apple Health, Pocket, Apple Photos and more) into SQLite database tables that match the schema of the system that they are imported from.

For my own personal Dogsheep (https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous...) that's 119 tables right now.

Then I use SQL queries against those tables to extract and combine data in ways that are useful to me.

If the schema of the systems I am importing from changes, I can update my queries to compensate for the change.

This protects me from having to solve for a standard schema up front - I take whatever those systems give me. But it lets me combine and search across all of the data from disparate systems essentially at runtime.

I even have a search engine for this, which is populated by SQL queries against the different source tables. You can see an example of how that works at https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io/blob/main/templates/d... - which powers the search interface at https://datasette.io/-/beta

I've been exploring this technique more over the past year and I really like it - https://datasette.io (code at https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io ) is a more recent and much more complicated example.

Extracting links from markdown and using them to populate some additional columns or tables at build time would be pretty straight forward.

I run SQLite in serverless environments (Cloud Run, Vercel, Heroku) for dozens of projects... but the trick is that they all treat the database as a read-only asset.

If I want to deploy updated data, I build a brand new image and deploy the application bundled with the data. I tend to run the deploys for these (including the database build) in GitHub Actions workflows.

This works really well, but only for applications that don't need to apply constant updates more than a few times an hour! If you have a constant stream of updates I still think you're better off using a hosted database like Heroku PostgreSQL or Google Cloud SQL.

One example of a site I deploy like that is https://datasette.io/ - it's built and deployed by this GitHub Actions workflow here: https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io/blob/main/.github/wor...

The best language for the task at hand, when presented with time constraints, is the one that you already know well. OP said in the article that they authored Papercups [1]. Adopting Elixir for a websocket-push service makes a lot of sense, then. However, why don't you learn Elixir, some OTP, and then reconsider that question? You could be missing out.

[1] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups - 5.2k stars, uses Phoenix 1.6

Papercups

Shameless plug here if anyone is interested in an open source live chat tool check out https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

Phoneix - Elixir

We're a live message tool and it is basically what Elixir is built for https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups.

The Elixir community has been great and incredibly friendly. I originally was worried about the size of the community but that hasn't been an issue the community has been super helpful. I also think the annual stackoverflow usage surveys are very misleading because most of the community's questions get asked in ElixirForum and not on Stackoverflow.

Phoneix is the web framework of Elixir which is very similar to Rails but minus a lot of the magic has been very helpful for our productivity as well.

If I had to built another service that is websocket heavy I would definitely use Elixir. Even if it was a standard crud app I would still most likely choose Elixir.