nathanstitt

It's pretty simple: I have a small company and we're using it internally. my hope by releasing it is that the ecosystem will grow and it'll become the best way to publish web apps (ambitious I know).

I do not know what you expect by "hardened server implementations", it's open-source and people will probably host it a lot of different ways? If you're talking about the various services it offers like imap/webdav, I'm using well established golang libraries which I hope are secure but I have not performed a security audit or anything like that.

HyperFormula was the key to unlocking the entire spreadsheet, the technical foundation of sparse rendering and multi-user interactions were easy enough with Yjs and and a few other libs, but I was completely stuck on how to support formulas beyond simple SUM and such until I found it.

Yea I really did want to go Nextcloud because it is the battle tested solution as you note, but a few things held me back.

  * It's UI felt dated - which I agree is not an entirely good reason to not use it, but certain stakeholders in the org that will be using it felt it wouldn't be acceptable.
  * Collabera Office, which underpins their doc solution is kinda weird how it runs, everything renders on the server and then is displayed on the clients.  Not mobile friendly at all.

I did really like the ecosystem though and did consider just writing the plugins I needed for it. But then that went down a rabbit hole in itself with Php which I don't have fond memories of.

Ultimately it was a case of "be the change you want to see in the world". This is my opinionated answer to what an online suite of apps should work like for better or worse. I'm in a good spot where I have a small group of users who I'm close to that can stress test it out and yell at me when stuff breaks.

yep very true, everyone has their preferred stack, and greenfield is _always_ easier than maintaining years worth of past code.

I did look really closely at Nextcloud when it came time to leave Google apps. I really wanted it to work but also wanted:

* Realtime updates - Pockebase gives us this for free.

* A native app - React Native <- this one worked out but does cause pain with the web version, some things don't work _quite_ as well as a standard React ap would.

* Lightweight docs that work on mobile. Collabora is very full-featured but is also pretty slow. It remains to be seen if I've successfully here because we're only starting to use our docs "for real"

And also: I'm absolutely sure this has many bugs that I've yet to uncover. All I can say is that I am planning on using it for real-world business stuff so I'm sure we'll be uncovering and fixing them throughout the next year.

yes, I'm planning to support it indefinitely - my company (~10 users) just started using it so we're very invested in it's success.

I'd love for people to write whatever crazy packages they can think of for it so it has a rich ecosystem. It has the ability for admins to add a git or NPM reference into the packages list and install packages on the fly like wordpress supports.

As for hosting as a service, maybe someday. I also own the tinycld.com so who knows.

Interesting, I wasn't aware that SES did inbound and it looks fairly affordable as well. I'll have to do this, thanks for mentioning it

Yes, Hyperformula is amazing! it's actually the primary reason TinyCld is AGPL vs MIT, doing so was totally worth it in order to be compatible with it's GPL3 license.