Show HN: Fieldbook: Lightweight Database with a Spreadsheet UI and a REST API

I would use an open source version of this immediately. I've written several hacked up projects using google spreadsheets and it works, but its unreliable. I would not want to use a smaller 3rd party service as I would be afraid of the service getting shutdown or neglected. I would be much more inclined to use and pay for this service if they also open sourced it. Maybe run it like wordpress, they make a lot of money :)

Hey Folks!<p>I&#x27;m the CTO of Fieldbook, we&#x27;re really proud of what we&#x27;ve built here. In particular, I really like our API explorer that allows you to run real node code right in the browser to explore our API. (And see our realtime updates in action on the same page). That feature is powered by Tonic (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tonicdev.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tonicdev.com</a>)<p>Its mad fast to setup a database with a REST api with Fieldbook, and we&#x27;d love to hear what you think &#x2F; what could be better &#x2F; etc.

Neat. How does this compare to Airtable? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;airtable.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;airtable.com&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve been using Fieldbook a little bit, and even playing around with their API.<p>It&#x27;s a great product I&#x27;m going to use more. Big fan - there have been several side projects where I&#x27;ve wanted to use Google Sheets as a prototype DB - with the simpler API and better relationship model, I&#x27;m going to use Fieldbook from now on.

It looks very nice. But I can&#x27;t integrate it into a project if I can&#x27;t guarantee that it will run even if Fieldbook-the-company changes business models next year. When can I deploy a self-hosted version, and how much will that cost?

The user interface looks beautiful and I like the innovation for the group&#x2F;sorting&#x2F;filtering. Allowing all three to be defined using drop downs within the single area is really neat. Fast to add and compact in space.<p>How does it handle data types? Can you put any type of data into any cell? If I want a column that is numbers is there anything that stops a user adding a string to one of the cells by mistake?

Can multiple people edit the same spreadsheet at the same time? If so, are their changes displayed live?

This looks really awesome. Can you lock columns or rows to prevent people from changing them?

This looks excellent! I recently started writing something similar for my phone since I needed something more flexible than the standard todo&#x2F;gtd apps. Do you have plans for a 1st party mobile client?

I&#x27;ve used Fieldbook a few times. It is incredibly neat.

It&#x27;s an interesting idea, However if it&#x27;s not self-hosted then I think their reach of customers is very limited. We all know most of the businesses run on spreadsheets and most of them don&#x27;t want to share that information with anyone.Unless you handle this problem with run time encryption or provide a self-hosted version It&#x27;s difficult to land lot of customers.

This is so awesome. Easy to use, set up in seconds, and is mobile friendly. Nice! Can&#x27;t believe no else has something like this.

Its not that difficult to use Google Spreadsheets as a database - here&#x27;s an app I put together in a couple of hours to allow people to rate players after a soccer game - currently used by a reddit sub:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.teamrating.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.teamrating.com</a>

Congratulations Jason. it looks awesome and has come a long way in the last year.

Looks like the beginnings of a QuickBase competitor, which would be welcome...Intuit&#x27;s pricing model is terrible.<p>I had high hopes for DabbleDB before Twitter bought them and shut it all down.

How does this differ from DabbleDB, which seemed to have all this and more?<p>(Sadly went nowhere and subsumed by Twitter.)

The UI is just gorgeous IMHO.<p>Can you share which frameworks you used ? Did you use a template for the front page ?

That looks like a really well made product, awesome UI!<p>What are some real world use case for using fieldbook?

Anyone remembers similar product DabbleDB? Or I&#x27;m too old?

is this a bit like sheetsu?

It would be nice to get something modern to replace what people used to do with FileMaker. This may be it.

Disclaimer: early Kinvey engineer here.<p>Doesn&#x27;t sound too far off from Kinvey and Parse except for the fact that MBaaS services have been around a lot longer and have much more robust mobile and web SDKs.