2019 has been flying by and it’s time we provide you with a thorough update regarding new product capabilities. Rest assured that our team has been hard at work enhancing 8base for you.
Below is a list of major updates to 8base but please know that we are making hundreds of iterations and refinements each month in response to user feedback, defects noticed and usability nuances.
As 8base is being used more and more we have found that developers love sharing their workspaces. To improve the developer experience we are now providing separation between a developer’s own workspaces and those shared with them.
We continue to add new help content to 8base including new video content and a To-Do MVC Tutorial.
Although 8base currently supports comprehensive role-based access controls at the table and field level, we have added the ability for developers to embed logic in support of complex security scenarios.
The 8base SDK now supports authentication using an API token in addition to our standard user-based authentication.
Many software projects require rich file handling capabilities. 8base handles this out of the box but we recently made some changes to improve the user experience by adding thumbnails into our data viewer. We just weren’t satisfied with the way we were presenting the data so we made it better.
File thumbnails are also clickable and expand to a full browser tab with the ability to perform file-type specific functions such as printing .pdfs or watching video and audio files. These same features are made available to developers looking to embed advanced file capabilities into their apps. This makes applications that require document and file management capabilities a snap.
We have a new configurable setting for numeric fields called Big Number that allows for storage of very large numbers (those in excess of 2,147,483,647). Large numbers such as these are typically required to support blockchain-based applications and are not currently supported in GraphQL.
Our first release allowed for retrieval of a single object by ID. Developers can now retrieve, update, or connect single objects using any unique field.
8base’s Serverless Compute environment now supports running tasks on a predefined schedule, in addition to event-trigger-based execution
Previously, developers deploying functions would compile code on their local computer and then deploy entire bundles along with their dependencies. This caused the deployment process to be slow and provided no ability to include binary dependencies. We’ve now implemented a very cool capability that greatly improves the developer experience by allowing them to upload their source code without dependencies. This makes the deployment way, way faster. We also cache dependencies and only install them when there is a change in the list of dependencies. This further accelerates deployment to under 10 seconds.
This month we broke ground on our user interface building capabilities. Our first iteration makes it possible for developers to generate fully-functional React code for basic CRUD (create, read, update, delete) screens using our Command Line Interface (CLI). All you need to do is select a table and a screen template and the CLI will generate files with React code and GraphQL queries ready to be utilized inside of your applications.
8base now supports React Native and Swift (iOS) and we have included a sample app for each in our SDK
We’ve added a Pagination component, improved the Date Picker, Progress Bar and Tooltip components in addition to refining the sizing of all components to improve usability for all built apps.
We have new sections in our documentation for Files API, Local Development and Authentication.
You can expect a very big release coming in April. We are working on some very cool new capabilities for the product and are excited to bring them to you so please stay tuned and always, always keep the feedback coming!
The 8base Team
We're excited about helping you achieve amazing results.
