Ask HN: Experiences with alternative front end-back end architectures

Re:Ask HN: Experiences with alternative front end-back end a... by 0KnowledgeGoof on Friday December 03, 2021 @06:52PM (#29437134)

My thoughts around that are to have all authorization and ownership encoded in database relations. I was thinking of a read-append-only table. This is a bit kooky maybe, but I experimented once with trying to make database constraints that verify a public key signature of the content of the record. One field containts signature of the user against the rest of the content of the record.

It was weird and ultimately at least Postgres couldn't support a cryptographic operation within a constraint, but it was fun to play with.

I make no claim any of this is practical right now, but I think there's at least theoeretical room to grow for that approach.

I'll look more into Phoenix! Thanks.

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Re:Ask HN: Experiences with alternative front end-back end a... by _448 on Saturday December 04, 2021 @10:10AM (#29441290)

> One field containts signature of the user against the rest of the content of the record.

What if there are multiple users authorised for that content?

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Re:Ask HN: Experiences with alternative front end-back end a... by 0KnowledgeGoof on Saturday December 04, 2021 @12:10PM (#29442235)

Hey, thanks for engaging and challenging my thought experiment. I think I could probably come up with a solution to that, but your point is made: this system will get arbitrarily complex very quickly. And require cryptography experts.

I definitely wouldn't do this for a Real Web App.

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