I’m new to Cuba Platform. Can someone tell me if it’s a good fit for my particular use-case?
I’m creating a social networking application/website and normally this would be sufficient with PHP. But my users work in medical facilities with strict technology guidelines, so my website requires more security than other typical social networks.
Just to be clear, users won’t share sensitive medical information on the website, but they will be asking questions to other professionals, therefore the website application needs to be accessible while they are at their workplace, and my users’ workplaces are more strict with website security than other workplaces.
In other words, this is a website for social networking not an enterprise application. But the users come from enterprise institutions which have strict requirements, and the website MAY need to communicate with other enterprise applications via API.
The Web Client front-end block is based on our Generic UI mechanism and Vaadin framework. You can create UI with this technology very fast, but it has the following drawbacks: it’s not mobile friendly (not truly responsive) and it stores the current UI state in server memory, which means that you cannot use it if you don’t know the maximum number of users connected to the system at the same time (to calculate required RAM size). So this front-end is a very good fit for internal users of an organization, but not well suited for public internet sites.
For public websites we recommend creating a JavaScript-only client using our Polymer Client module. It talks to the backend through our universal REST API, so it is a subject to access control imposed by the security subsystem the same as above mentioned Web Client. And in case of Polymer Client, you have a mobile-first UI working completely in browser with no impact on the server memory.
So in case you decide to implement your project on CUBA, I would recommend creating the user-facing UI using Polymer and administrative UI using Generic UI. All business logic and integrations will work on middle tier which will be a common part of your application.
I will leave the topic in “Need Answer” state - maybe someone will add some ideas.