Prisma won the hearts of many developers with its excellent developer experience - the elegant schema language, the intuitive query API, and the unmatched type-safety. However, as time went by, its focus shifted and innovation in the ORM space has slowed down considerably. It's true that many successful OSS projects struggle to meet the ever-growing demands, but you'll be surprised to find that many seemingly fundamental features that have been requested for years are still missing today, such as:

• Define type of content of Json field #3219
• Support for Polymorphic Associations #1644
• Soft deletes (e.g. deleted_at) #3398

MCP is trending in AI, But…​

MCP(Model Context Protocol) is undoubtedly one of the most exciting trends in AI now. Not only is everyone talking about it, but everyone is also rushing to develop their version to secure a seat at the table of the AI era. Don't feel so? Guess how many MCP servers are listed in MCP Server Directory ?

Is SaaS Really Dead?​

Several months ago, the internet was abuzz with the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying, “SaaS is dead.”

The conversation started with a question from Bill Gurley about whether Satya was worried that newer startups are building applications with an AI-first approach, which could obfuscate traditional infrastructure like Excel or CRM. Here is Satya’s response:

In the previous post, we discussed the new extensibility opportunities of the core ORM by adopting Kysely. In this post, we'll continue exploring the plan for v3's new plugin system that allows you to deeply customize ZenStack's behavior in a clean and maintainable way.

In the previous post, we discussed the general plan for ZenStack v3 and the big refactor. This post will explore the extensibility opportunities the new architecture brings to the core ORM.

Back in late 2022, when Jiasheng and I discussed how to make building web apps less painful, we initially thought of building something for people without a programming background. We eventually couldn't convince ourselves it could work, so we decided to take a step back and try to make developers' lives easier. That "step back" became the start of ZenStack.

The past two and half years have been full of joy and fulfillment. By building the tool, seeing how people use it, and learning what works and what doesn't, we've got a better understanding of the intricacy of "easy". What people need is not just writing less code or shipping faster, but rather an inexplicable balance between low cognition burden and high flexibility. We are probably on the right track to solving the problem, but there's still a long way ahead. While considering what to do in V3, we think it's a good time to better align ZenStack's architecture with the ultimate goal.

Few developers like writing document​

If you have ever worked as a developer in a large company, you know that coding is just one small part of the daily responsibilities. One of Google's full-stack software engineers, Ray Farias, once estimated that developers write about 100-150 lines of code per day at Google. While this estimate may vary across different teams, the order of magnitude matches my observations as a developer at Microsoft.

Building a full-fledged multi-tenant application can be very challenging. Besides having a flexible sign-up and sign-in system, you also need to implement several other essential pieces:

• Creating and managing tenants
• User invitation flow
• Managing roles and permissions
• Enforcing data segregation and access control throughout the entire application

It sounds like lots of work, and it indeed is. You may have done this multiple times if you're a veteran SaaS developer.

Building a full-fledged multi-tenant application can be very challenging. Besides having a flexible sign-up and sign-in system, you also need to implement several other essential pieces:

• Creating and managing tenants
• User invitation flow
• Managing roles and permissions
• Enforcing data segregation and access control throughout the entire application

It sounds like lots of work, and it indeed is. You may have done this multiple times if you're a veteran SaaS developer.

Building a full-fledged multi-tenant application can be very challenging. Besides having a flexible sign-up and sign-in system, you also need to implement several other essential pieces:

• Creating and managing tenants
• User invitation flow
• Managing roles and permissions
• Enforcing data segregation and access control throughout the entire application

It sounds like lots of work, and it indeed is. You may have done this multiple times if you're a veteran SaaS developer.