But we didn't stop there: this SaaS for our open source browser product is entirely built like this^0: behind the scenes it's a collection of bash scripts that implement and execute the business operation of the SaaS.
So basically, it's a command-line interface to the SaaS. Think of it this way, say I didn't have a website, with login, and "click a button to open a browser", but instead people would write me letters, send me cheques, or call me on the phone. Then I can serve their requests manually, at the command line.
The reason I made it like this was:
- clear separation between thin web front-end and actual business logic
- nice command-line interface (options, usage, help, clear error messages) to business logic for maintenance and support to jump on and fix things
- inheritance of operating system permissions and user process isolation
- highly testable implementation
Maybe this is dumb, but I really like it. To me it's an architecture and approach that makes sense.
I'm sure this is not new, and I think a lot of good quality operations must be built via this way. I highly align with the author's stance of the composition of a few simple command line tools to get the job done.
Perhaps we can call this "unix driven development", or "unix-philosophy backend engineering"
0: https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro (saas coming soonish)
You're being a jerk, someone shared something they were proud of that's relevant to the discussion. What's the problem?
sure, a lot of the criticisms of CSV are true, but given the above constraints it's really hard to beat them.
I used to work for a large, old company whose products you have all bought and buy (and which shall remain nameless) about 15 years ago. I worked on data interchange between the systems used for record keeping of said products and various other downstream or parallel systems (same purpose, separate system because left over from merger/acquisition).
So basically bulk data import and export. The product was 15 years old at that point. Data interchange was via various fixed width or delimited (CSV but the C might be some other character or character sequence) files transferred to and from various SFTP servers.
It's been a while but there were probably like 20 or 30 different such data sources or exports going in and out. Worked like a charm. I bet they're still used without much change. The frontend was being rewritten at the time (old one was in Smalltalk).