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rethinkdbhorizon
MonkeyBonkey
MonkeyBonkey

Reputation: 47871

is rethinkdb horizon well suited for a rest api web service?

I see that rethinkdb now has an app server called horizon and it's examples include a lot of client apps without any backend server code.

If I wanted to create a REST api service with rethinkdb - does horizon still add value or should I just create a standard node.js rest api using rethinkdb libraries directly?

I see that horizon has some authentication, authorization and permissions built in which could be useful but I'm not sure if turning it into an api instead of a standard web app is making horizon bend into something it's not supposed to be.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 854

Answers (2)

John Leimgruber
John Leimgruber

Reputation: 26

If I wanted to create a REST api service with rethinkdb - does horizon still add value

No, if all you want is a REST API endpoint mapping CRUD operations onto your RethinkDB data, then Horizon won't help you there.

Horizon is great if you want websocket API w/ "real-time" features and plan to use the Horizon client in the browser.

Horizon is opinionated in how it handles users and permissions (it enforces them on the server side using different users/permissions for each app instead of the RethinkDB users table).

# RethinkDB
r.db('rethinkdb').table('users')
r.db('rethinkdb').table('permissions')

# Horizon
r.db('myapp_internal').table('users')
r.db('myapp_internal').table('users_auth')

I'm currently playing around with a stack that uses feathers to design common services that can be exposed over a REST or websocket transport. Its more complex, but I might use both feathers and Horizon, but there will be some work to map permissions correctly across both endpoints. (Plus schema enforcement...) Feathers supports various authentication providers that return JWT which you could then pass to horizon (if you set the same secret_key)...

If you don't need the real-time features in your database, you might want to check out PostgREST as it has out of the box JWT authentication and uses actual database roles for row level authorization. "One source of truth". You could use that together with PostGraphQL if you want both REST and GraphQL! Plus you can store JSON data in columns these days so its all good!

So many options!

Good luck!

Upvotes: 1

mlucy
mlucy

Reputation: 5289

You can embed Horizon in a node app and only use a subset of its features: http://horizon.io/docs/embed/ . You should be able to piggyback on the authentication pretty easily. It would be harder to piggyback on the permissions if you're implementing your own REST API, because the permissions system only controls access to collections.

Personally I suspect it will be more trouble than it's worth if you're embedding it just for the authentication.

Upvotes: 0

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