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by webdevladder
660 days ago
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As a potential dev user this looks really intriguing, hitting all of the main points I was looking for. I build apps in this space, and the open source alternatives I've evaluated are lacking specifically in "live queries" or don't use Postgres. The docs look great too. In the docs[1]: > Instant uses a declarative syntax for querying. It's like GraphQL without the configuration. Would you be interested in elaborating more about this decision/design? [1] https://www.instantdb.com/docs/instaql |
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Our initial intuition was to expose a language like SQL in the frontend.
We decided against this approach for 3 reasons:
1. Adding SQL would mean we would have to bundle SQLite, which would add a few hundred kilobytes to a bundle
2. SQL itself has a large spec, and would be difficult to make reactive
3. What's worst: most of the time on the frontend you want to make tree-like queries (users -> posts -> comments). Writing queries that like that is relatively difficult in SQL [1]
We wanted a language that felt intuitive on the frontend. We ended up gravitating towards something like GraphQL. But then, why not use GraphQL itself? Mainly because it's a separate syntax from javascript.
We wanted to use data structures instead of strings when writing apps. Datastructures let you manipulate and build new queries.
For example, if you are making a table with filters, you could manipulate the query to include the filters. [2]
So we thought: what if you could express GraphQL as javascript objects?
``` { users: { posts: { comments: { } } } ```
This made frontend queries intuitive, and you can 'generate' these objects programatically.
For more info about this, we wrote an essay about the initial design journey here: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/next_firebase
[1] We wrote the language choice here: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/next_firebase#language
[2] We programatically generate queries for the Instant Explorer itself: https://github.com/instantdb/instant/blob/main/client/www/li...