have hoodie-plugin-api available to other apps

[janl]

The use-case here is that data might come from other node apps, that can’t easily be turned into Hoodie plugins. It’s be nice to make hoodie.database available to these apps via a node module (and even other language modules are possible), so they can import data into Hoodie and have the CouchDB documents have the right format and everything.

Maybe this is already possible tin hoodie-plugin-api today and I just haven’t looked hard enough, but IIRC it is all a bit too entangled to be used standalone.

[peetersn]

Note that the data doesn't necessarily come from another app. One of the use cases that we are looking at would be to have some static content (let's say some product catalog) that needs to be available for all users to look at (readonly). On the other hand, we could also have a case where each user creates documents that have to be visible for all the other users (so not only for the current user only).

[janl]

@peetersn totally, this is only one, more generic bit that helps solve your problem :)

[janl]

@peetersn actually, would you mind opening another ticket here that explains your use-case? that way the team can weigh in better :)

[peetersn]

See #25

[ndarilek]

Very interested in this as well. My use case is building out plugins that provide complex functionality which might have other dependencies, or that I might not want running in the main Hoodie process.

For instance, if a user purchases a subscription via my app, I'd like to spin up a series of Docker containers via Fleet, then update the user's document when that succeeds. I could build this plugin as an entirely separate Docker container linked to the same Couch, with an entirely separate set of dependencies than the main server process. It could even run on a different server, treating CouchDB as a distributed communications bus. If it crashed, it wouldn't bring down the rest of the app, and I could fix bugs in isolated pieces of the app while still keeping most functionality available. I could also mock out the functionality for building fast prototypes.

[janl]

@ndarilek that’s an excellent use case, thank you for sharing!