Fullstack

Alex Cole discusses dynamic web apps, how serverless solutions compare to in-house stacks, and how product development changes when individual engineers can own features end-to-end.

Let's build a full-stack chat app to talk to ChatGPT on its new API!

You can build a database-powered app with end-to-end type safety and real-time updates without needing to learn how to manage databases. This tutorial will show you how.

Dynamic application developers need global state management, not a database. James (@jamesacowling) presents his talk from the HYTRADBOI 2022 database conference on how Convex is rethinking how app developers manage global state.

In this post, we’ll look at how to use the moderation API to flag messages before sending them to Chat-GPT, and patterns for handling these errors in a full-stack React app.

How to store multiple personalities Convex and provide them to the chatGPT API, enabling changing personalities mid-conversation. This is a follow-up to Building a full-stack ChatGPT app.

Reactive backends like Convex make building live-updating apps a cinch, but default behavior might be too reactive for some use cases. Not to worry! Let’s fine-tune the reactive dataflow of a Convex + React app to deliver a better UX.

Oftentimes during testing we want to mock out our backend so we can unit test our UI components without talking to our actual server code. In this article, we’ll explore options for testing React components that call Convex React hooks using mocking and dependency injection. To do this, I’ve written a sample TypeScript React app using the Vitest testing framework. The patterns presented in this post are also applicable to other JavaScript apps and frameworks.

Implement asynchronous job patterns using a table to track progress. Fire-and-forget, cancelation, timeouts, and more.

Implementing end-to-end encryption on top of Convex to build a secret-sharing app.

Getting users to sign up for a new service before seeing any benefits is challenging. In this post, we looked at a couple of strategies for managing user information without requiring a login.

How to implement session storage with Convex, using some helper functions we wrote. While most of your data is associated with a user or another document, sometimes you have data that is specific to a user’s browser tab, or associated with a user who isn’t logged in. Some of this data is stored on the client, such as in the browser’s `sessionStorage` or `localStorage`, while other data is stored on the server.

Function validation is important for a production app because you can’t always control which clients are talking to your server. See how to use zod to validate your Convex functions, using our withZod wrapper.

Implementing an "upvote" feature 4 ways with Convex.

Some patterns for incorporating presence into a web app leveraging Convex, and sharing some tips & utilities I built along the way.

When your database supports ACID semantics, you're free to write code the intuitive way and ignore the complexities of concurrency and failure.

Working with Convex has made our development workflow so much more streamlined—we no longer have to worry about the complexities of traditional frontend-backend communication, enabling us to build out the core of our new application portal at a blazing-fast speed.

For write-heavy applications, use single flighting to dynamically throttle requests. See how we implement this with React hooks for Convex.

Convex 0.5.0 introduces built-in support for actions — arbitrary lambda functions that run in a Node.js environment on the Convex cloud. We use the term action to differentiate these functions from Convex mutation and query functions, which enable transactional writes and dynamic subscriptions that update whenever data changes.

Today, a new wave of innovation is making databases approachable for developers without requiring a specialized skillset, opening the door to a whole new category of ambitious web experiences. In this panel, you’ll hear from the people pushing the boundaries of database technology and learn what’s possible — and what’s coming.

Today we’re going to talk about how to flip features on and off remotely using a clever use of the reactive nature of Convex queries.

The serverless movement has eliminated so many problems but it has left application developers with the hardest one of all: managing distributed state.

The future of databases is Convex. This video originally aired at Jamstack 2022, highlighting the next evolution of modern web development architecture.

Convex is a JS-powered database and backend for web apps that’s reactive — you can use it to create endpoints and queries that update automatically when data changes. Tom Ballinger will teach us how.

How do I ensure my Convex database queries are fast and efficient? When should I define an index? What is an index? This document explains how you should think about query performance in Convex by describing a simplified model of how queries and indexes function.

Why does anything really need to run on the server anymore? And even if it does, do I, the developer, need to be so involved? Yes! Even in a serverless world, the backend computing context being a real, discrete environment that you have control and influence over is not only necessary but hugely beneficial.

You don’t have to worry about the platform locking you into a decision that seems convenient at first but is a headache to deal with later.

While making Fast5, Convex's wordle-style multiplayer racing game, we ran into several interesting challenges. This week, let's dig into managing the combination of local and global state.

At Convex, we're creating a platform for managing global state for web developers. Unsurprisingly, we've found one of the best ways to improve our platform is to actually build stuff with it!

Relational databases are powerful tools for persisting data, but using them to build interactive web apps requires a lot of work. A web app architecture built on a relational database is an entire cluster of databases, backends, caching nodes, and Pub/Sub servers. And even after you invest in all of that infrastructure you'll still need to explicitly define your database schema upfront and write cumbersome SQL queries. At Convex we believe that web developers shouldn't have to worry about any of this. We can handle the servers, caching, and reactivity and you can focus on your product.

On Cloud Firestore, you'll have to do some acrobatics to integrate with React and listen for realtime updates. Down the road, you'll find your app full of slow loading experiences from request waterfalls and your database full of half-committed mutations.

Sujay (@sujayakar314) walks through how easy it is to build a dynamic web app with global state on Convex. Join the Convex beta at https://convex.dev.

Ideas around immutability, purity, and dataflow programming are quietly saturating our technologies like Bitcoin and React. And while these early inroads are enabling exciting new ways to build large and dependable applications, there is still much to do to realize the full potential of this revolution.