Hi Rich,

While I'm a developer, I'm not a web developer, and Express and Loopback 
are entirely new to me. But I've just perused their documentation, and my 
understanding is this:

* Node.js is a way of running JavaScript apps outside a browser.
* Express is a small library that simplifies the task of creating Node.js 
apps. Basically it does a lot of the common boilerplate for you.
* Loopback extends Express with mechanisms for talking to backend storage 
systems.

TiddlyWiki's design is unique, so common boilerplate doesn't apply. And it 
has its own specialised backend: either divs in an HTML file or .tid files 
in a wiki folder.

Theoretically somebody could write a plugin wrapping around Loopback to 
allow TiddlyWiki to pull data in from some other backend and surface it as 
tiddlers. And that backend could indeed be .tid files in another wiki 
folder, as long as a corresponding Loopback extension was also written. But 
this could only work in a TiddlyWiki running outside the browser, as that's 
where Express and Loopback have to operate.

TiddlyWiki on Node.js loads all of the tiddlers into its live store as soon 
as it starts. It doesn't keep track of any changes made to the wiki folder 
thereafter. The only changes that can be made to the live store while 
TiddlyWiki is running are those made by TiddlyWiki itself. So even if 
someone wrote an alternative backend, it couldn't work with dynamically 
changing data – which is possibly what you had in mind as one of the "much 
cooler things that could be done".

Besides, if one TiddlyWiki could serve as the backend to another, wouldn't 
that just mean they were both the same TiddlyWiki?

– æ

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