A search for json storage as a service

23 Jan 2019 - Henry Ma

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

Germination

Back to the very first days of becoming an indie maker, starting to build web-based MVP(Minimum Viable Product), I quickly found myself in need of JSON Storage (as a ) Service which is:

• Lightweight on setup, use and maintain
• API【Out-of-the-box】
• Production ready
• Better to have offline support
• Better to have decentralized networking support
• Better to be open source
• Free

Wonderlands being explored

• JSON@Github
• “JSON Store”@Google

Candidates

• JSON-Server: Get a full fake REST API with zero coding in less than 30 seconds (seriously)

  Focusing on serving prototyping and mocking, thus seems like not very fit for production use. eg, FileAsync for concurrency not supported yet in node version???

• lowdb: Small local JSON database powered by Lodash (supports Node, Electron and the browser)

  The storage layer behind JSON-Server.

• JSONPlaceholder: A simple online fake REST API server

  Fake Online REST API for Testing and Prototyping Serving ~200M requests per month Powered by JSON Server + LowDB

• jsonstore.io: Free and secured JSON-based cloud datastore for small projects
• JSONbin.io | Free JSON storage service and JSON hosting service.

  Additional(>10,000 requests) needs payment

• jsonbin.org

  Currently in beta

• Kinto: A generic JSON document store with sharing and synchronisation

  Powered by Mozilla and its ecosystem, pretty good overall experience based on current experimental usage, a little bit heavy mainly due to design.

• Gun: A realtime, decentralized, offline-first, mutable graph database engine
• Automerge: A JSON-like data structure (a CRDT) that can be modified concurrently by different users, and merged again automatically
• OrbitDB : Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

Conclusions

• For prototyping and mocking, especially as front-end developers, JSON-Server/JSONPlaceholder suite would be the best choice.
• For production ready JSON store as a service

  • Lightweight? Go with lowdb
  • Generic and Reuse? Go with Kinto
  • Simple and Hosted? Try jsonstore.io/jsonbin.io/jsonbin.org and choose.

• For decentralization solution, Gun/Automerge/OrbitDB all seem like good ones.

  Would probably go back for a update once getting more practical experieces.