| > it is somewhat rubbish for user experience with the friction of getting files in and out of your app It's not worse, generally, than the average experience of using a NodeJS program that won't run because the dependencies didn't install correctly or it's the wrong version of the runtime, or... (cf Armstrong; or, to borrow a saying by Ousterhout (with a small tweak): the greatest improvement to a program of all is when it goes from not-working to working). The two worst rough edges for file saving for browser-based apps are: - if you consider, say, a paint program that you're using to work on an image, it can't implement the ordinary save behavior where some keyboard shortcut or menu items saves (overwrites) the current file you're working on; to do the same in the browser requires the user to do the equivalent of a Save As every time (instead of a Save)—i.e. complete with a prompt to double check that the user really wants to overwrite the previous file - some browsers have changed the default download behavior so it automatically saves to a downloads directory without asking the user and allowing them to change the path/filename with a conventional filepicker; this setting has to be changed by the user themselves to get the old, circa 2005 browser download behavior These are both issues that can be fixed and don't require something as expansive as Chrome's filesystem API proposal. re alternative options to your NodeJS-powered video tagging application server: check out <https://redbean.dev/> |
Redbean looks good, I didn't know about the APE format, but unfortunately doesn't solve the file system access problem without presumably rewriting a backend in Lua. Docker, reluctantly, is better than nothing.