We are excited to announce JSbox Beta! JSbox connects your apps together using webhooks and JavaScript. It’s similar to Zapier and IFTTT, but more flexible. For example, opening an issue on GitHub could trigger JSbox to create a corresponding card on Trello. Since events are triggered by webhooks they run immediately and since JSbox runs JavaScript, triggers can be arbitrarily complex.
We came up with the idea when we were building the checkout process for thoughtbot books. Whenever someone buys one of our books they need to be added to the corresponding GitHub repository for that book. If they enter an invalid GitHub username we want to be notified via email so we could follow up with them directly. It seemed like overkill to build and deploy an entire app just to make some GitHub API calls and send some emails.
Another use case we found for JSbox was our sales lead form. When a user submits a request to hire us on thoughtbot.com, the request is saved and a Trello card is created on our sales board with the appropriate office manager’s face on it. In the past this was handled by a Rails backend. In October we released FormKeep, which creates form endpoints. We wanted to use FormKeep on our site, but it wasn’t capable of integrating with Trello directly. It was, however, able to send webhooks. JSbox now receives these webhooks and runs some JavaScript to add the Trello card and put the corresponding face on it.
Beta release
Use JSbox Beta at your own risk. It is unclear whether running untrusted code inside a Docker container is safe. We’re using it in production and haven’t had any issues. If enough people find JSbox useful we will continue to develop it. If it continues to prove useful we’ll take it out of beta and begin charging for it. Head over to JSbox.io and let us know what you think!
