What the?  Yeah I know, weird huh?  But it is kind of true.  Okay so maybe not a “mob”. It’s more of a “collection”. Our FileMaker to QuickBook Connection tool, fmQBO is a collection of micro-services that work together to form a larger set of features. The only reason this matters is that it lets us innovate and iterate super fast. Watch the video to see what we mean.

Martin Folwer of “Gang of Four” fame, has a nice write up on the Microservice Architecture. Read that for a more in-depth look. In this case what we mean is that our connection API Service is broken up into smaller web services, which can be maintained and updated independently of one another.  They are loosely coupled.  In the video we look at how fast it is to fix and push a new version of one of our services to the cloud.

node.js is the perfect platform for this task. Web services can be written in just a few lines of code.  Watch my JavaScript is Eating the World video from the FileMaker 2016 DevCon, for more on how little code it takes to construct a web server in Node and JavaScript. In this case I am using micro, a tiny little framework for making micro-services drop dead simple.  Deploying to the cloud takes about 30 seconds using the amazingly awesome now from Zeit.

In the end, what we get is the ability to deploy new code to our users any time we want. We can re-act quickly to new ideas, features and bugs. Not only can we make new things super fast. But we can throw out things that are no longer needed, which is almost as important.  That adds up to happier customers. 🙂