Interestingly, we (Fieldbook) used handsontable for a long time, but eventually found it wasn't performant enough for the size of data we had (also we just needed to be able to do more customization than we could wrangle out of it)
Definitely hear you! We are working on some performance improvements right now, if you contact us in app, we might be able to figure out what is happening with your data. 2500 rows and 20 columns should still be snappy!
We definitely intend to be in this for the long haul! We will always let your data out of Fieldbook, we already support CSV downloads of any sheet or view, and we are thinking about a wide variety of export and sync options to other services / data formats.
I understand being leary of business model changes. While we can't make any guarantees in the wild world of startups, we can say that we want a free tier to remain forever, and would give plenty of warning if it were ever to change. A little more information available here: http://docs.fieldbook.com/docs/security-and-privacy
We don't currently have any short term plans for a self-hosted version.
Yep! Definitely. We don't (yet) show cursors and who is connected like google docs does, but you do see changes replicated to all windows / users in real time. You can even see your own real-time changes from API calls in realtime while looking at your book.
We want you to use Fieldbook as your database, so we don't limit the number of api calls or books you can have in Fieldbook! (we hate when you run up against an artificial limit and have to scramble to get your product back online). :)
We don't scale as far as we want to right now. For a good experience, we're limited to about 10k rows in a book. Definitely something we want to improve a LOT in the future.
The paid tier right now offers a couple of things, mainly focused on business administration. In particular, the ability to manage accounts in your organization (remove access once someone has left the company for instance) and priority support.
We love using Fieldbook for CMS use cases. We think the public API coupled with public posts is a great fit for the API, too.
We don't handle image uploads yet. Definitely something we want to support in the future. Of course, you can put urls in the cells and build things that way... Definitely something we want to improve in the future :)
Unfortunately we don't yet have that particular feature... But we definitely want to do something like that in the future. What are you thinking you'd use it for (we love to collect information like that for when we do implement the feature).
Obviously, using the API you could build a restricted interface on top of fieldbook, but that probably isn't what your looking for, I understand :).
We're also considering doing a mode where you can't change any of the metadata (sheets/fields) but can add/remove/change rows.
I'm the CTO of Fieldbook, we're really proud of what we've built here. In particular, I really like our API explorer that allows you to run real node code right in the browser to explore our API. (And see our realtime updates in action on the same page). That feature is powered by Tonic (https://tonicdev.com)
Its mad fast to setup a database with a REST api with Fieldbook, and we'd love to hear what you think / what could be better / etc.
Sorry it didn't make sense. Definitely something we need to iterate more on. If you want some specific help, we are definitely happy to provide us. We have an intercom/message us chat system that we love to help users with.
Thanks! We've tried to do a bunch of iteration on user experience, obviously more to do. Fast iteration and unit/automated tests have been key to being able to build this product.
Greetings fellow devs! I'm the CTO of Fieldbook, happy to talk about anything. We use a node backend stack, with mongodb, and a backbone based front end. We use socketio for realtime and rabbit for some back end messaging.
I'm also one of the authors of RecordStream which has been discussed on here before (https://github.com/benbernard/RecordStream). I see Fieldbook as an extension of RecordStream but for the web instead of JSON records on the command line.
I just wanted to say thanks to the author of this article (I hope they are reading this section). This post really made me think hard about reddit, and about my own personal values. I've decided, personally, to stay away from reddit because of this, and I appreciate the write up.
Maybe someday reddit will be a more inclusive place, but for now I agree with the author and will be voting with my feet, as they say.
This is not to say or imply that any of you should necessarily do the same, I think each person needs to come to their own conclusions (which can definitely be different for any number of great reasons)