Ask HN: Is asset building as a service (ABaaS) a good idea?

3 points

10 years ago

I have this idea which I think is a killer, revolutionary, amazing idea but not sure if I'm right or just insane. Create a service that accepts a list of Javascript dependencies (from either NPM or GitHub), minifies them, combines them, and returns them to you in one file, in a RESTful API. Like this:

POST https://assetbuildservice.com/assets

assets[]=github.com/foobar/package1&assets[]=github.com/bazquz/package2

302 Redirect

Location: https://assetbuildservice.com/assets/da39a3ee5e6b4b0d325

GET https://assetbuildservice.com/assets/da39a3ee5e6b4b0d325?prod=1

200 OK

/* Ref: https://assetbuildservice.com/assets/da39a3ee5e6b4b0d325 * AssetBuildService.com built your assets! */ (function(a,b,c){d,e,f=0,0,1,...

The ABaaS would know how to make RequireJS play nice with AMD/CommonJS in one project, and other JS projects that don't use a requiring system. But that's it. It doesn't know how to transpile other languages to JS or do anything fancy with dependency trees -- it just creates a flat file that combines every dependency. It's too dumb to figure out what order they go in too, so you'd have to experiment with that in your API calls. It could be an open source library that's also hosted on a community-funded server.

What do you think? Useful or useless?

2 comments