Grandeur

Today we launched third party integrations with Grandeur Cloud on Product Hunt 🥳. Using third party services instead of reinventing the wheel while developing feature-rich apps can go a long way in terms of saving time and money. Slack, Github, Gitlab, Jira are some of the most integrated services on the web.

Here's the product link 😌 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/integrations-with-grandeur-cloud

We built this literally in ~2 days. We read docs of the major service API providers like Slack, Github, Gitlab and we realized that while the problem was slackening, the solution wasn't. We quickly designed the control flow diagram on zoom call the same night and started implementing in the morning. It was ready precisely in a day and a half and then there we were showing it to PH community in hope of feedback.

Two of the features we implemented are worth highlighting:

• You can set up multiple integrations per service which means one full privileged slack integration for your admin app and another read/write only integration for your users app.

• You can select the service provider from a list of third parties. But if the service you need isn't in the list, you can add it with just one extra step 😁.

P.S. We'll keep third party integrations free forever 😋

Datastore is very integral to Grandeur Cloud. This was required to be implemented as soon as possible and now it's finally up.

It works as a front-end NOSQL document database. Developers can insert, delete, and get their data directly from the front-end of their apps using the datastore API. But not just limited to that, they can create query pipelines to pass output of one query to input of the next one. This feature can be extremely powerful at times. A developer can get some documents based on a search query, sort the data in ascending order of a certain field, multiply two fields to form a third field, mask the multiplied fields out, and then output the result.

A very basic usage of datastore could be just for storing logs from devices for extracting analytics from the data later.

We still have to work a lot on the cloud analytics though.

After developing IoT apps, and testing them on local environment, the product developers need to make them live through hosting service, in order to access the app using a URL from anywhere in the world. To make things simple for them, we integrated hosting service in Grandeur Cloud. Now developers have no need to go to third party services to host their apps.

Custom domains are allowed too but in the Network plan.

That's another addition to our value proposition.

Grandeur storage is for letting product developers store files like display pictures of their users, and other assets.

A very basic form of storage is ready and integrated with Grandeur core, with a basic file sharing option: shareable link which gives anyone access to get the file. But a filesystem-like hierarchial structure isn't yet supported.

I have also started working on a basic datastore which is a front-end database for developers.

The core is the most important part which handles all IoT communications between apps and devices in realtime. Making the core event-driven was tough but reducing the latency below 200ms was tougher. Any change in devices state is needed to be reflected on the app instantly. We didn't use regular MQTT protocol. Instead we designed our own to reach that necessary milestone. And we did it after all.

We followed the model similar to pub/sub to allow IoT communications in form of events. A user can update a variable from app and its update handler on device-end would process that update.

And we created two containers for storing device variables: parms (for directly controllable parameters like an appliance's ON/OFF state which we can control form an app) and summary (for uncontrollable parameters like voltage/current of an appliance which we may just want to plot to see their pattern).

That feeling when I just clicked the button and the room turned white with light without any realizable delay. ❤️

In the core, I included an accounts manager and a devices registry. I also built an Auth API that lets the product developers build signup, signin type of functionalities in their apps. And there's a devices API
that runs on realtime communication channel. It lets them control their hardware devices from their apps.

File storage is the next in pipeline.