This is a follow-up to my previous Replit application. I was able to successfully migrate the Replit application onto my local development server, ironically with the help of Replit itself.
I am NOT a fan of TypeScript, but Replict was instrumental in helping sort out dependcies and setup database connections. For instance, Replit initially setup Websockets for my Postgres database. I struggled to get them to work and eventually just asked Replet to remove them. It took three seconds and Replit completely removed the websocket aspects of the code. Is this ideal for large production environment? No, but the goal was just to judge how complicated it would be to move outside of the Replit environment.
What I found interesting is that it was NOT shy about helping me fix things on my local workstation. I actually would have thought the developer would have put guardrails to KEEP me in their environment (more money). I hope they do NOT add them in the future.
When hosting it on a different location, you have to test it various different scenarios.
For instance, ON Replit’s servers they host their own PostGres database server within the container. Most production applications would host the database on a seperate server (virtual or not). When doing this, you introduce a lot of other issues, including the remote IP (or DNS) and ports. Also, since the Replit container seems to have stored all of their tables in the “public” schema, it will not work on a normally secured PostGres server. A correctly setup PostGres server would give you your own schema to work with, under a secure role. Replit fixed this in about a second, which was very helpful.
So is Replit going to replace all developement as we know it? Not for the time being. You still have to have some idea of basic application frameworks (Rest/ORM/Client server architecture).
Replit still needs to understand some of the fundamental UX features you need to change. For instance, I wanted the entire navigation panel present on ALL of my chatbot pages ONLY IF a user was logged in. It needed to understand the “navigation panel”. I think if you just mentioned “button” or links, it would have probably understood the change you needed done, but it would have taken a lot longer time to get the work completed.
Some interesting development debugging “bugs”. When I first asked for the ENTIRE code base to be packaged for download, it conviently forgot to give me the ENTIRE dependency file list. So when I was trying to install it locally, the application was not working. After some debugging, the troubleshooting guides kept mentioning the bugs I was seeing were related to OLDER packaged version of the dependicies. I then asked Replit why it didn’t give me the entire list the first time and it basically said “whoops, I’ll fix it”. Skynet moment? Not sure.
I would REALLY love to see it build applications in other languages other than Typescript. I’m more familiar with LAMP, so a PHP version would be great for myself and may encourage more developers into the platform as well.
PS: GitHub Desktop for Windows makes github pushes SUPER easy. I highly recommend it.
My next AI application will involve video streams of customers waiting for a checkout salesperson. I want to see if I can count the amount of customers in a line and send a notification to a phone chat to see why someone is not up front in the store. (ie: There are 15 customers in 2 lines with no sales associate).
Git Repository: https://github.com/jtsSTECH/ReplitEcomChatBot
