Hey all,
I’ve been a huge fan of building in what I’m calling the BEN stack: using Bubble for all “straightforward” functionality like frontend, login, and database, and then using an Express/Node app to do backend functionality that Bubble can’t handle.
I’m trying to put this stack through its paces, so I’m curious if any of you have any apps that are running into limitations. Here are a few examples of things I’m building that use the stack:
- an API doesn’t return data in the way we need it to, so build a custom API wrapper in Express to reformat the data to pull into Bubble
- needing to scrape a website as part of a workflow using a virtual browser (user provides link, we scrape it and return certain elements to Bubble)
- API intensive apps that rely on cron jobs: every 60 seconds, keep this service outside of Bubble up to date (calendar, app, email, etc)
- workflow action that creates a separate hosted HTML/CSS page (landing page generator) running on a node server that a user can hook up to a custom domain with an IP address
- Building embeddable apps that don’t run into iFrame cross-origin issues
Here’s a more in-depth example of how I built NotionMetrics, which taps into a few of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVGbrLF7sEo