Do you need data converter as a Service?
Hi, would you find it useful to have NoCode tool for data conversion? Various APIs give you various data. Ofc it is most common to have JSON, but sometimes it is not. For example XML, CSV, PDF etc.
I am thinking of creating tool for data normalization. Example use cases:
- You get products data in XML, and want to insert it to your ecommerce shop where you need CSV
- You have PDF with tables, and you need it as CSV
- You get JSON with data, and want to put it to your AirTable
And many other types of data conversions.
What do you think, is there some type of conversion you would need?
Also the more advanced data conversions would be useful for programming purposes (PDF to CSV)
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Could work, I don't see any other service doing that which means low competition.
Though I think I won't rely on a 3rd party with my data, that much. What if that service is down, or possibly leaks data.
Also, data conversion is mostly one-liners from stack overflow or some package these days.
About leaking - that might be a concern for users and might not trust me (understandable) but I am planning to create without saving processed data. It is simple pipe. Data comes in and out.
About one-liners - thats also true. But sometimes the thing is more complex. I have create PDF2CSV which works quite well as it uses programmatical data extraction and AI mixed.
When thinking about this idea I came up with another idea. Image scaling service. It would be specifically for web apps and mobile apps. App give source URL and width or height. Image gets loaded on my backend service, gets scaled down, and mobile app loads smaller image (for example thumbnail) to save data transfer and processing on mobile.
Typicall use cases:
Generally when I more think about it, it would be few more specialized conversions/processing services
Actually, I had been working on a little side project https://imgsrc.space , it is an image and video placeholder service.
This means we do a lot of image transformations daily and I think I used the "sharp" engine to do that. If I choose your service to perform the transformation then that means, every time a user requests an image,
This results in images getting delivered slower, and my bandwidth charges rising.
Also, your bandwidth charges would be rising (dealing with images is a costly affair), so you would be charging me more than your bandwidth cost.
Which will make running the service more expensive for me.
For reference here is a service that does exactly that - https://lipo.io
When you say that the app gives you the source URL, you transform it and then send back the scaled-down image URL, does that means that you would be storing the image on your server and then delivering it to the mobile app.
Then that just becomes a CDN service.
On backend it gives less sense, but on frontend/mobile-side when there isn't any other option i think it might be useful. The bandwith for me will be bigger than for mobile.
My service would not store any data, it would just process it in memory and respond to requester
shouldn't I be using something like Cloudinary on a mobile app?
can you explain, how your service would be useful for a mobile app or web app?