A super cool new project I just learned about, creating a lot of discussion on HN.

PostgREST is a standalone web server that turns your PostgreSQL database directly into a RESTful API. The structural constraints and permissions in the database determine the API endpoints and operations.

The motivation for PostGREST feels very Rails-ish in spirit - focusing on convention over configuration and preventing room for programming errors.

Using PostgREST is an alternative to manual CRUD programming. Custom API servers suffer problems. Writing business logic often duplicates, ignores or hobbles database structure. Object-relational mapping is a leaky abstraction leading to slow imperative code. The PostgREST philosophy establishes a single declarative source of truth: the data itself.

This works only for Postgres DB’s right now. I think we’ll see a lot more of these trends that help app developers create data interoperability into their products.

This reminds me of apps like Sheetsu, which turns any Google spreadsheet into an API.