Functions & messages

While most actions occur on your frontend code, sometimes it’s helpful to have functions running server-side.

One clear example would be scheduling a daily task. For example, let’s say you’d like to run a function every day to handle the trial expiration process.

We have three components helping to expand your application logic out of the frontend.

Task scheduler

The task scheduler allows you to execute a function or publish a message at a specific interval. For example, you may create complex intervals like the first Monday of each month at 9 am.

Event messages

The event messages system allows you and the system to publish messages and have functions handling the logic.

Let’s say you’d like to build a live chat application. All conversations between the agent and the user should be saved so they can be referenced later.

The real-time component already publishes messages, you would create a function that triggers on the “chan_in” message and you’d be able to save the chat message into your database.

Server-side functions

The server-side functions are written in JavaScript. You may see them more like plugins that use a scripting language. It’s not running in a Node environment.

They run inside a custom runtime that we’ve created to make things simple. You may use custom functions we’ve added on top of the standard JavaScript 5.1 specifications.

You can think of the function as if it were running on the frontend with StaticBackend’s JavaScript library but without the window and document objects, you get when running inside a browser.

Server-side functions aim to allow the developer to react to system messages and custom triggers with a simple programming model in a sandboxed runtime.

We will add functions as we get more feedback from users. Please make sure to let us know if you need critical functionality.