Little Webtask.io sketch

Webtask.io is a wonderful service that allows deploying little server-side functions in the cloud without worrying (or even thinking) about server setup.

It's one of the many alternatives in the serverless movement to allow people to deploy lambda functions that can potentially scale at a fraction of cost of traditional solutions.

Webtask provides the most interesting and seamless development experience. You can even write functions with their online editor, straight in the browser. In my case, I wrote a little Node.js function and deployed with their CLI.

Every Webtask function can be invoked as regular remote service or API call. GET parameters can be used as well.

Here a little example (powered by Vue.js) that allows the user to add or subtract a counter, saving the result in the cloud. Webtask comes with a 500Kb size limit for simple JSON file persistence.

See the Pen Simple WebTask.io example for fun by Fabio Franchino (@abusedmedia) on CodePen.

The task is a Node.js function that uses a bunch of Webtask functions to save and retrieve the stored JSON file:

module.exports = function (ctx, cb) {
  ctx.storage.get(function (error, data) {
    if (error) return cb(error)

    data = data || {count: 0}

    var val = parseInt(ctx.query.dir)

    if (val && !isNaN(val)) {
      data.count = data.count + val

      ctx.storage.set(data, {force: 1}, function (error) {
        if (error) return cb(error)
        cb(null, {status: 200, data: data})
      })
    } else {
      cb(null, {status: 200, data: data})
    }
  })
}

Source here.