What is Membranelink

Membrane is an JavaScript/TypeScript environment for building and running small personal applications.

Cron-jobs, workflows, Discord bots, home automation, polling websites, handling webhooks, are perfect use-cases for Membrane.

Featureslink

• Durable JavaScript/TypeScript engine. Membrane programs can run forever and any state (i.e. JavaScript objects) is transparently persisted to disk.
• Data Graph. A powerful abstraction that's used for communication between programs and to/from the outside world.
• Capability-based access control. Programs can only access what you allow and nothing else.
• Support for many NPM packages.

No other platform gives you complete visibility into what your code is doing, has done, or can do.

Membrane gives you the power to easily and predictably interact with web services via their APIs and easily build useful abstractions and functionality.

Programslink

Membrane is similar to an operating system; you deploy programs to it and it takes care of communication, logging, resources, etc.

In Membrane, you build custom functionality (bots, workflows, etc) by writing programs. Programs can reference each other's nodes to create powerful abstractions.

As a starting user, you'll first install drivers to talk to APIs you care about, then write programs using the nodes exposed by those drivers to build something useful to you or your team. You can always use fetch and/or build your own drivers if you want.

Check out The Program Directory for many drivers and examples, anyone is welcome to contribute new drivers or improve existing ones.

More information in the programs section.

The Membrane Graphlink

As mentioned above, each running program exposes a graph. The combination of these graphs is what we call the user's Membrane Graph.

The Membrane Graph is a powerful abstraction with many benefits:

• Unifies how data is read, regardless of its source.
• Abstracts away many particularities of individual APIs like pagination, data formats, headers, webhooks models, URL encoding, etc.
• Provides a way to declaratively reference data in a fine-grained way.
• Allows for easy understanding of the flow of events and data.
• Serves as a access-control mechanism.

The graph guarantees that programs (especially ones you didn't write) can do what they say they do, and nothing else. It also enables visibility into everything a program has done. Nothing is opaque in Membrane.

Membrane programs can't directly make network requests. Instead, they interact with the world via graph nodes. Even fetch uses the graph behind the scene.

Durable Programslink

Membrane programs are durable. This means you don't need to store data in a database or file to make it persist, the state of your program (the JS heap) is transparently and efficiently persisted every time it changes.

To keep data around, put it in the state object and that's it.

Promises can be await'ed indefinitely without worrying about execution timeouts.