hook.io supports building webhooks and microservices in Smalltalk.

So we have SmallTalk as a Service.

Here is a quick demo:

Source Code: https://hook.io/marak/examples-smalltalk-hello-world/source

Live Demo: https://hook.io/marak/examples-smalltalk-hello-world?owner=foo

How would you compare this to CGI/FastCGI? Also, you’ve got a name collision with the Haskell “stack” tool for dependency management.

I follow this project on Github mostly because of my curiosity.

Does anyone actually use this here?

It seems like a really bad idea. The last thing I want on my command line is a tool trying to auto-correct my mistakes. Seems like it could cause unintended consequences.

Really cool! Someone added Romanian this morning!

Can’t wait to see what other contributions come in.

Excuse the nitpicking, but what’s the point in saying “i18n internationalization” when “i18n” is literally just a short form for “internationalization”?

YOU LIED, it says you have only added support for TEN programming languages. WHERE IS MY ELEVENTH LANGUAGE? Could I suggest BASIC? :D

Anyway – it looks pretty interesting, and having played around with Lambda, I’m super pleased that there’s other people out there thinking the same way and working on different variations and solutions in this space.

Constructive criticism follows.

1. your page doesn’t really look professional enough for the audience, in my opinion; if you found a way to hire a graphic designer to look more convincingly corporate and less back-of-the-napkin, it might help out.

2. And who is that audience anyway? The correct answer may vary, but my answer is “people who are streaming data from place X to place Y and want to do transform Z to it along the way.” You know – corporate types. What I bet it is not, is “people who know 11 languages and want that to be the primary selling point of the software they’re using.” You’re selling an integration nexus, but those sorts of things first have to work, and work well for the business case, and then go into the nitty gritty of how much support they offer to various languages once they’re closing the sale.

3. To that end, what does this integrate with? How do I get data in and out? What’s the SLA? What do you hook up with? How about encryption? SSL? Can you read the data when I send it to my process? If so, why the hell should I trust you? Does it work with ETL? How many processes can I run at once? What happens if the process gets stuck? Do I pay for time when events aren’t coming in? What’s the latency of the service? What’s the bandwidth of the service? What is this confusingly named ‘AGPL’ thing and why would I ever want to put that on my precious corporate servers?

On that last point – I do know what the AGPL is, but you should make clear: hook.io is dual licensed software. It is free to use and install, as long as any changes are freely returned to the authors for their use (including commercial use). Or, if you are a corporation that does not wish to obey those terms, hook.io is available under a standard commercial license for a fee.

1. What languages are the ones that people care about? Probably not CoffeeScript (which you misspell as ‘Coffee-Script’, btw). Definitely not Smalltalk. Probably Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby. You should take out CoffeeScript, Scheme, and Smalltalk. Those are not selling points. Those are anchors around your future expansion. Every question you get about the Scheme implementation is going to be wasted. You don’t have the time to deal with the upkeep. You’re tiny. You need to make the actual product that people want. Lead with the 4-5 (more than Amazon!) best interfaces you have, polish them to the finest sheen, and mention the others in an ‘oh also’ page, saying “and other languages available via our amazing plugin architecture”. Get Java support. Java is gigantic. Maybe C# too.

Definitely do not do the fork/exec binary thing that this first implementation appears to be for all the non-javascript languages. That will be super slow for a lot of languages and a lot of use cases.

1. You could probably do a lot better than node.js for the base language for this thing. Node.js is pleasingly fast at some things but it is pragmatically pretty bad at complex tasks involving possibly-blocking 3rd party language integrations. People at the kind of shops that might use Lambda are often grown up enough on the backend not to want to deal with node. Similarly, you can’t ship something based on Github Gists, as brilliant as that is (I had that idea too), because if github ever got mad, that would be bad.

2. You want non-HTTP integrations too. ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Kinesis or whatever. Plaster that all over the front page. That’s the important thing. Nobody cares about your implementation, people only care about how you are solving the actual problem they have.

3. “A featured section will be created on the hook.io website for all Developer Community Managers to optionally list their profile / website.” Don’t beg. It’s not seemly. Your thing is valuable, and you should be proud of your work so far. Don’t clutter up the value proposition with a bunch of unrelated featured nonsense just because some dude said he would maintain object pascal bindings for you.

All my thoughts only, intended constructively. Good luck!

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AWS Lambda looks really cool! These types of services are the future.

If anyone is interested in an open-source alternative to AWS Lamba ( with no amazon lock-in ) check out my project http://hook.io

I like the look of this but before I used it I’d have to understand more about how it works… how does it establish the connection to the external? is it ssh? is there some other protocol it uses?

It might be a good idea to justify “down-votes” with a select box option.

For a user to down-vote a comment, a simple reason would be required.

Such as:

• Inflammatory
• Irrelevant
• Factually incorrect
• Other

You could also optionally justify “up-votes”.

• Insightful
• Funny
• Additional resource
• Other

Just a thought! :–)