I stopped working on ifServ after about 10 months in October of 2024. Moved on to a couple other things (including getting a few AWS Certificates), and generally got very busy with the day job and other stuff. Speaking of the day job, I spend at least one hour per week in a meeting with five or six other people discussing… rules. Fiddly rules about desired customer behavior. I say “rules” in quotes because we’re really talking about custom code for individual customers. Lots of IFs... And at the end of these meetings, I think “I wish we had an IF Server”. So, I decided to jump back into it intensely for a couple weeks and see how far I can get.
The goal for this little sprint is to:
- De-suckify the UX in general. It will still suck (because I suck at UX), but I want to try and make it at least sensible.
- A Tester / Request builder framework for calling rules from right within the app (no more postman!) and asserting various aspects about the results (think lightweight built-in Rest-Assured)
- Some basic tree drag-drop gestures – so containers can be reorganized and rules can be moved around, etc.
- Introduce “Community Containers” – containers which can be forked by anyone as a starting point. All rules and tests will come along for free. With this, I can start building some actual demo content for various use-cases.
- Lots of other little things that I keep thinking up while working on it 🙂
The goal is to make it possible for someone to actually figure out how to use it.
Here’s a sneak peek at the Tester/Request Builder with a Woot! (Passing Test)
The plan is to work intensely on these things until 1-April-2025 (about 2 weeks). It’s going to be a sprint. More to come…
Infrastructure
Along with these applicaiton changes, the app is now running in AWS. Front end is in a bucket. Database is RDS. Service layer is in ECS. It’s a very scaled down (read CHEAP) architecture, but it’s robust enough to use and demo the app.
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