What's the business model? E.g. open tooling, pay for hosting/monitoring/optimization?
We operate the infra, so we charge for it like aws, firebase, etc. We plan to be pretty cheap, charge for usage, and have a generous free tier.
I guess my two concerns about solutions like this are always A) vendor lock-in B) whether it's too big of a project for any one company and requires a community of contributors to realize the vision.
In the short term it doesn't really matter because clearly being able to build an app is a huge step up from not being able to build an app regardless (which is why companies like Bubble.is are doing so well), but in the long term it seems like there are 10 - 15 companies working on this so eventually there will be more options and those factors will be key differentiators.
We haven't decided on transactional consistency yet - if there are particular goals there, I'd love to hear them. Ostensibly, we want to allow users to design the right distributed system for themselves, and provide ways of saying "we want this DB to prioritize availability over consistency", for example. But we haven't yet decided how to do that or what to support at launch, nor where the bounds of a transaction will be.
We have a DB migration tool. The DB has a current type, and you specify the new type, and add rollforward and rollback functions. That creates a new name for the datastore: any use of the old name uses the old type, and the new name uses the new type (both on the same datastore, applying rollforward and rollback as necessary for the interface you need). Once you've removed all the references to the old name, you mark the migration as complete, and we'll handle the underlying transformation of the data behind the scenes.
The history of RPC is...checkered. It's possible that every attempt to make remote process calls as simple as local function calls has resulted in terrible abstractions that leak like a sieve.
My suggestion (for what it's worth) is to bake the notion of message passing into the language, and make it as simple as possible.
Can you link to something about message passing? I'm familiar with a concept with this name, but I don't quite see what you mean.
While waiting for the whole blog post, do you have any elements to share?
That said, it has a lot of similarities to LightTable, especially regarding coding with live values.
