Showcase Bubble+Xano app in production

Felipe Letelier

Hi everyone! Due to the polemic caused by Bubble's announcement, with permission of my client, I wanted to showcase one of the apps me and my partner Sergio created together (Sergio in the frontend using Bubble and I in the backend with Xano).

EV compare

This is marketplace that helps you compare EV cars that are for sale in the US. It is still in a proof of concept stage, but it is already functional and in production.

Sample link

Challenges

This marketplace uses different data sources, including an internal/Xano DB that is updated every day using background tasks. Mixing the date is not as simple as it sounds, but it is feasible! For this reason we have to setup different integrations slowing down the API calls, fortunately we can cache the responses using the endpoint's parameters as reference (available in the lower paid plan). We want to improve this further using custom cache responses, but as we are still in the POC stage we don't want to go all in right now. That being said, the marketplace works pretty fast for the standard filtering options, so feel free to test it thoroughly!

As it is easy to iterate on the designs and flows in Bubble, keeping up with the client's request was difficult, but we managed to make it work and Xano's development was rarely the bottleneck in the production line.

Lessons

I'm not going to lie, creating the endpoints to make it work was not an easy task, as there were many integrations and unexpected behaviours we had to prepare for different scenarios, for instance some third party APIs do not have always the same response schema so we had to create an snippet to address those cases as you never know what could be missing.

Also, be aware that changing stuff too much tends to break your system, so have always copies of your endpoints for development, testing and production environments!

Conclusion

It is possible to integrate Bubble and Xano, it was challenging at some points, but at the end of the day, the development was faster than what we expected and Xano gave us a completely new set of tools to do stuff that we couldn't just with Bubble alone, I encourage anyone reading this to give it a try!

PD: We could have a showcase channel 😄

Felipe Letelier

Sean Montgomery

Thanks for all this detail .

I agree that more visibility on showcasing projects is a great idea. We will be thinking through how to beat accomplish this.