Time flies when you’re having fun – and 2022 has come and gone! This has been a year of major evolution for 8base: from bootstrapped to Series A; from BaaS to launching our frontend App Builder into beta; and expanding our global footprint with 8base Colombia. We’ve been working hard with great excitement about 2023 and beyond.

The 8base BaaS

We thank all of you for the fanaticism behind the 8base BaaS. We’ve witnessed so much success in our community – from digital agencies that have transformed their businesses using 8base to solo frontend developers tackling large, complex projects to hyperscaling consumer startups building new capabilities while never worrying about their infrastructure, DevOps, APIs and more.In 2022, we focused on performance and scalability: increasing response times by a factor of 4x; releasing a self-hosted version of 8base that can be installed on private AWS accounts; and as we move into 2023, our roadmap includes:

In early Q1, a major performance improvement will be released that extends the use of foreign keys in 8base data models.

Radical improvements to our native authentication capabilities with a new hosted login page with customization capabilities, in addition to configurable SSO and other features.

8base will begin leveraging Kubernetes containerization technology, which will enhance our serverless capabilities and begin the process of making us cloud independent.

Extending our application services to include email, text messaging and push notification services.

Enhancements to Role-Based Access Controls.

Rapidly broadening the list of secure integrations we support which will include direct database connections, API connections and connections to SaaS data sources.

And, lots more…

8base App Builder

We are primed for a significant release in January 2023 that will include some MAJOR enhancements:

Dramatic performance improvements for large applications.

A rewrite of Error Management, which streamlines how our tools report errors and assist users in diagnosing them. This will continue to evolve as we add additional debugging tools.

Improvements in the reliability and predictability of State Management, in addition to some cool new features for facilitate setting properties to an state value, a code block or a literal value

Collaboration capabilities to support multiple, concurrent developers; as well as branching/versioning and integration with GIT to enable professional developer workflow.

‍

And work continues to deliver the following in early 2023:

Enhancing the ability for developers to copy objects within App Builder and also import Pages, Layouts, Functions, Requests, etc. easily from other Projects/Workspaces.

Refining our Design Time Experience, which includes the design canvas itself, page layouts and individual components. We will be working to add new components in addition to making them easier and more intuitive. We will also improve the canvas and container components, reducing the need to be a CSS expert to leverage the power of either.

Support for Custom Components and Custom Libraries, which broadens the number of use cases App Builder can support to nearly infinite.

Full-Stack

In early 2023, we will debut a new 8base Home with the introduction of Projects. This new capability is intended to unify backend and frontend efforts into a full-stack entity. Projects will support:

Backend-only applications as well as full-stack.

Using multiple frontends with a single backend, in addition to allowing cross-connect of other Project backends.

When users create full-stack projects, 8base will help users get up and running by auto-connecting the backend and frontend while auto-generating many of the application services required to make the application usable fast.

This includes things like login, logout and password reset pages, authentication and SSO services and more.

‍

In all cases, App Builder makes the code enabling this fully visible and modifiable, so developers are never constrained. These services can be turned off, too.

We will also be releasing Project Templates, which are pre-built applications, capabilities and other application components that can be used when creating a new Project or even importing them into existing Projects.

As we wind down 2022, we give major thanks to all of you – our 10,000+ developers from 100+ countries – for kicking the tires, testing and deploying; and providing feedback as you have explored and built on 8base. You will continue to be the driving force behind the priorities in our Product Roadmap. We cannot wait to see what you will build in 2023 with 8base!