Introducing Groovestack

Today, we are solving a hard problem by giving a name to a software stack that we want to see evolve into a robust community. Groovestack is a moniker we are assigning to a fullstack consisting of:

We have used many stacks over the years to build complex, large-scale applications, but our team has developed an affinity for this specific combination that we believe offers a compelling mix of capability, scalability, extensibility and developer experience.

Naming Groovestack is the first step in our efforts to to build a community around like-minded developers and teams.

If you are already using these components, Congratulations! You are an innaugural Groovestack community member.

If you are looking to build your next fullstack application, then let us share why we think Groovestack is an ideal choice:

PostgreSQL has proven itself as the most robust open source database. It has consistently increased in both capabilities and performance with an aggressive roadmap of major version upgrades. In just the last few iterations, we’ve seen extensive support for JSON data, new scaling and partitioning architectures, reliable pub-sub capabilites and expanded support for foreign data wrappers. PostgreSQL is great and getting better.

Ruby on Rails has proven itself as a framework that is developer-friendly, adaptable, and scalable. Some of the largest software platforms including Shopify, Stripe and Github have built on and extended Rails as a core part of their software infrastructure. The Rails ecosystem is a large and diverse community with myriad options for every integration and capability-set an application may need.

GraphQL is a type-centric API protocol that provides more consistent standards for exposing API operations on data and workflows. One can think of GraphQL as an evolution from REST and JSONAPI that provides patterns and practices for many of the more complex edge cases that other API design languages 'leave as an exercise for the developer.' These standards enable more advanced tools for API documentation, validation and even automated testing.

React-admin is a frontend framework for quickly building dashboards and complex authenticated interfaces. It leverages React and Material design (MUI) to allow developers to build CRUD and advanced UIs with a low-code approach. React-admin provides a fast track to frontend MVPs and a rich set of design patterns for fully customizing the user experience.

Our team’s confidence in Groovestack has grown as we have built more applications and modules on this framework. We’ve found this combination helps avoid hitting constraints caused by tool limitations and allow us to implement modern platform features from geographical-based dynamics to end-to-end realtime messaging with recipes leveraging key tool features.

To help jumpstart the Groovestack Community, we have launched:

These are great places to subscribe if you want to start contributing.

We have also built a Groovestart starter kit that you can launch with:

to build a brand new groovestack application, learn how the parts fit together and start customizing your own modules.

Finally, we will be documenting more about Groovestack and Groovestack-compatible modules that we produce in the coming months on the Groovestack homepage:

Groovestack: Fullstack Postgres, Rails, GraphQL and React-Admin

We welcome you to join us on the Groovestack journey! Let’s get building together.