Posted by bashtian 21 hours ago
I always had the problem that building HTML pages is really simple now, but trying to save data required hosting it somewhere, and sharing it afterwards was not easy. Over the last few months, I've been building an app called Capsule (it’s also the file extension name) written in Rust with Tauri 2.0 that allows packing an HTML app and its data into a single SQLite file.
The HTML file and any related assets are directly embedded in the database. User data can either be saved as a localStorage key/value store or via a MongoDB-inspired collections API as documents, saved in a table in the file. You can also save other assets, like PDF files or images, directly in the database to keep different documents together. All data can be easily exported to CSV or JSON if needed.
Privacy and security were a big priority for me, so documents cannot do anything out of the box. They don’t have direct access to the file system and they require permission to access the internet. The permission model is still something I’m working to improve. Capsule documents can also use local or remote AI models for document specific AI features.
One downside with this approach is that multiple people working on it will create different copies. To make it possible to merge different copies of the same file, each data entry has a unique UUID and timestamp.
I’m planning to open up the file format specification for the 1.0 version of the app so other apps can read or write Capsule files.
You can try it out in the web preview at https://withcapsule.app/preview with pre-built templates or use any AI provider of your choice to create a custom, Capsule-optimized app by using the following prompt:
"Please read the app wizard instructions at https://withcapsule.app/prompt.txt and help me design an app.“
I’m still working on the file format but there are migrations for each new version, so data should never be lost when using newer versions of the app in the future. Please let me know if you have any ideas or use cases where this might make sense or does not work.
What I would want to see is a version of this that lets me write an app that can write to the DB through an API, and then have a google drive-esque "host this for me" thing.
A focus on local-first really misses the point IMO. Like sure it's good it can be run locally, but really most people have a distribution problem. Be a distribution solution!
The thing I would do involves having the hosting just be available by dropping the capsule into the google drive/dropbox-y thing, and then having it be that you can just copy/paste the file to someone _and it carries over the data and everything by default_.
For a lot of people the "thing" is the app + the data. Sometimes you want to decouple them but a lot of times you don't want to.
I think it would be very rare for someone to want to share the single-file bundle just without data.
>Keeping the data schemaless makes it also easier for merging data or importing data from a CSV.
Not sure how it makes easier. There is always an implicit or explicit schema. IMHO explicit is often better.