Hi HN! I’m Dillon, the founder of Celest (<a href="https://celest.dev">https://celest.dev</a>). Celest is a
backend-as-a-service that lets you build full-stack Flutter and Dart apps
without leaving your IDE. There’s a short demo video here:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evs1f0zHpzk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evs1f0zHpzk</a><p>At AWS, I built the Amplify Flutter framework and saw the extraordinary power
(and complexity) the modern cloud presents. I wore many hats in that role, but
the hat I most disliked was devops. I just wanted to write my business logic and
have it work.<p>As a Flutter developer, I love writing Dart, and I want to use it everywhere.
But in order to do so today, it requires stringing together Docker, Terraform
and a healthy dose of cloud expertise to make it work.
I built Celest so that I never have to use anything but Dart in my
backends, and so other Flutter developers won’t either!<p>Celest brings infrastructure-from-code to Dart in a way that’s fun to write.
Cloud functions are just top-level Dart functions and the inputs and outputs are
automatically serialized for you. Run <i>celest start</i> to spin up a local
environment with hot reload, and <i>celest deploy</i> to deploy to our managed cloud
in under a few minutes. A type-safe client is generated for you as you build to
create an RPC-like interface for your backend.<p>Celest currently offers serverless functions, authentication, and authorization.
Our goal for the coming months is to further offer an offline-first SQL database
and ORM. One cool thing about our authorization mechanism is a novel token
format which combines Google’s Macaroons [1] with the Cedar policy language [2]
for expressing caveats. I call them Corks!
<a href="https://github.com/celest-dev/celest/tree/main/packages/corks_cedar">https://github.com/celest-dev/celest/tree/main/packages/cork...</a><p>You can download the CLI at <a href="https://celest.dev">https://celest.dev</a> and play in a local environment
for free with no sign ups. The client runtime is open-sourced as BSD at
<a href="https://github.com/celest-dev/celest">https://github.com/celest-dev/celest</a>. There are some examples here:
<a href="https://github.com/celest-dev/celest/tree/main/examples">https://github.com/celest-dev/celest/tree/main/examples</a>.<p>Check us out and let us know what you think!<p>[1] <a href="https://research.google/pubs/macaroons-cookies-with-contextual-caveats-for-decentralized-authorization-in-the-cloud/" rel="nofollow">https://research.google/pubs/macaroons-cookies-with-contextu...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.cedarpolicy.com/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.cedarpolicy.com/en</a>