Anvil App Platform: Using GitHub as a Datastore

literally one day after the last blog post on anvil (and their news announcement), ian and meredydd did a proof of concept that made anvil retrieve/store data from/to github. specifically, it was a json document. you are not going to rest a transactional database on this design, financial or otherwise, but you might be super happy for a “ very small data ” application. or one that is for editing configuration — refer my config as code category.

on the anvil works site is a blog post about it . that blog entry details what/how they've done this ultimately very simple thing. they don’t show the diff, though. in a technology that is using scm as a data store, after bumping the head revision of a document programmatically, you’re going to want to check out the change you just made:

"yay!" indeed.

as well as dealing with github’s apis for working with documents (as data), it’d be great to see these guys enhance their own git capability for storage, and add index/view apis for a mini-couchdb experience.

this type of solutioning is going to be part of a wave of cheaper internal enterprise apps again, and maybe also apps online for strangers where cheap data capture is more important that a 100% ‘just so’ ui experience.