[knappador]

How to know if you might be a customer: Did you make a mockup that needs a backend but have little backend coding experience and are sick of including a bunch of the same libraries? If yes, maybe.

In short, they're integrating some commonly used API's and backend programs (Elastic Search etc) and putting a graphical programming model on top of it.

Crappy backends are pretty easy to throw up on a VPS or Heroku these days. It's so easy that I'm likely to select an app server(s) and language based on what library (if any) is most critical to that particular request type.

At first I wasn't sure who the target customer could possibly be. Was it a PaaS service? BackendaaS? A service like this lives in a weird space. It's almost only good for early product dev and when the team's backend devs are green.

Things like having unit tests, scale, completely custom capability etc will drive everyone who makes a successful product out at the very time that they can start to afford paying a lot.

Don't burn all your money yet ;-D

[sgress454]

It's true that when this has been tried in the past, there's always been a point where the "magic" ends--where there's some functionality that you need which isn't included. Treeline is different because you can always create new components when you need them. The Machine specification (http://node-machine.org) is open-source, and you can upload new machinepacks to NPM (Treeline imports them automatically), or create them from right within the app. So the magic never has to end :)

Or as PG put it, "You get to make your own blocks!"

[knappador]

I'd bump that point and the integration with API's way up in the site copy. My first thought as an engineer when I see graphical programming tools is, "oooh...another one of those." It's the most controversial selling point. If I know I can do 90% of my backend work fast enough to slap an MVP together, the tradeoff might make sense. My default plan is a VPS with Flask or some other cheapo web app server that can pull 300req/s. That's a step beyond just using Heroku, but also a valid competitive option.

How would you position your product relative to Heroku in terms of power and how much schlep you trade for how much ease-of-use? I think it's very okay to be clear for now in order to convert well with your core customers.

[sgress454]

We're not a production hosting platform--at least not at the moment. We do spin up a preview server for you to play around with your app while you build it in Treeline, but it's not meant to compete with Heroku or any such provider. Instead, we give you a way to download your project as a fully-formed SailsJS app which you can deploy anywhere that supports Node. You can also use the same tool to preview your app on your local computer while still keeping it synched up with Treeline in real time--hooray for sockets!

[knappador]

Okay, cool. Now that I've finished being uninformed enough to get questions out of the way, I'm guessing you chose Sails because it has some kind of JS DB for prototyping. I would spend time asking if Sails is the desired output format because, although I've only used it during a Startup Weekend fling, it feels like a framework, and don't forget that it's said that while you can plug your code into a library, in Soviet framework, code plugs into you -- I imagine that although a backend dev might be thinking, "Great, Node, kill me softly with 'undefined'" they would still kill if the implementation was really minimal with nothing in their way; if they like another JS framework or want to write a common backend for web and mobile apps, not having Sails' distractions in the way could be big for legitimately doing some of their work for them.

Another big feature would be doing the work to plug persistence into other DB's to make the output DB agnostic to some extent. Migrations would be the next step, but too much of a chore. All you need are to define data models for XYZ ORM/DB adapter to make the machine-generated step hit the right starting point for hand-off. If the ideal use case is in prototyping, I don't think migrations is in the right vein.

Armchair-CTO, signing off.

[mikermcneil]

We chose Sails because we built it :)

[mikermcneil]

Definitely don't burn any money until you try the thing out :)

[Padding]

So graphical programming counts as not programming these days.