Why now? So What?
Sequoia founder Don Valentine famously asked founders: “Why now?” and “So what?”
Regarding FREST:
Why Now?
Two opportunities:
programming is inefficient and unreliable
non-programmers mostly can’t do their own computing without consulting a programmer
The relational model offers large, relatively easy responses to both opportunities. There are a variety of other opportunities in rethinking how APIs work and how we create user interfaces.
Relations are grossly under-used
Because SQL is abominable, yet it has been our only way to operate on data relationally, the elegance, security and efficiency of the relational model in representing most of your business logic has been almost entirely ignored.
Muggles find relations intuitive
The software industry has done an awful job of providing computing abilities to non-programmers. Tools like Visual Basic, while admirable and extremely effective, still require the user to commit to learning the fundamentals of programming, which is non-trivial and challenging or impossible for many.
The really generally successful end-user computing tools are:
- Excel and
- FileMaker/Access/FoxPro/4th Dimension/…
Excel is a functional programming tool. The others are relational programming tools. They let the user employ the most useful data types (simple types, relations, lists and functions) through flexible user interface actions.
Note that functions are just a special kind of relation. Note also that the user is directly manipulating data structures, but expressed in a rich GUI, rather than through code.
UIs from APIs
It’s actually pretty simple to support a pretty flexible sort of embedding of content from multiple sources. Rather than a rigid, app-like web, we can have a component based UI model.
Rich content coexists happily within this model: Relationally, a “document” can be a single atomic value of a column, although it will often be useful to provide relational views of their contents — imagine a drawing document accessible as tables of objects, groups, layers, and so on.
So What?
Imagine that all of the data in the world was available through a ten times richer version of Access or FileMaker. All of the most useful information in the world is available as tables. Everything useful you can do with SQL, you can do trivially across different data sources and APIs that don’t need to cooperate (but they can for efficiency).
Just by intuitive GUI operations, the user can slice and dice the data they are seeing and how it is represented.
For this new paradigm to be realised, data sources need only implement a little more than the typical decent REST API (consisting of type/metadata information and GUI representation).
Time Travel? We can do much better than Time Travel
There are remarkable new UI possibilities based on the seamless embeddability of FREST components. Since (internal and external) API calls are presented as database updates, it is trivial to just keep them. It would then be fairly easy to let the user click on anything they can see and we can show them a tree-style trace of how this thing was built, and we can allow the user to change any of the arguments to change what they’re seeing or to see a new thing.
Over to you
What I need is the time to implement this, while still having a reasonable income. I’m pretty flexible. A part-time tech or writing gig seems most likely. But there are several possible handsome products and services that could be built on top of this, if you’re in an investing sort of mood. A tiny investment, even by typical Angel standards, would be enough.
If you can help change the world by supporting me, please get in touch!