Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 76 posts

Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems?

#1

Post by alphalima »

I'm thinking about introducing a low-code system to handle internal operational processes. I'm thinking things like viewing/handling dead-letter messages, manual intervention decision points, short lived operational tasks that haven't yet/won't be automated.

I'd expect the software engineering team to manage these apps, so the benefit I can see is the quick turnaround on the UI, rather than handing over to non-engineering users for development.

What are people's experiences with these tools? More specifically:

Can you do an effective SDLC with them? e.g. code on a staging environment, push to version control, promote to prod, rollback to old version

Have you actually saved time with them?

Did you avoid introducing unworkable complexity?

Re: Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems?

#2

Post by speedgoose »

I tested Retool a bit, which is great, but it is way too expensive for my projects, so I went with the open-source Appsmith instead.

It has been successful, but I recently had to patch it to remove a new annoying «made with appsmith» ad on our applications that can only be disabled on the enterprise edition or if you edit the source code of the open source one and are willing to share your patch of course. Another important planned feature, SAML/OpenID has also recently been announced to be only for the not open source enterprise edition. Their Kubernetes helm chart is a mess too. They want to be noob friendly with everything in a single stateful container. I understand the reasons, but I don’t like it.

On the good parts, we build applications in a few days, and it’s great for prototyping and simple applications. One large application we build has reached the limits of no-code platforms, in our opinion. It will be rewritten in code, but we think it was not a waste of time and resources as we could iterate fast, and we didn’t know whether a more expensive development would be worth it.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems?

#4

Post by nulbyte »

speedgoose wrote: post #2

I tested Retool a bit, which is great, but it is way too expensive for my projects, so I went with the open-source Appsmith instead. It has been successful, but I recently had to patch it to remove a new annoying «made with appsmith» ad on our applications that can only be disabled on the enterprise edition or if you edit the source code of the open source one and are willing to share your patch of course. Another im…

> if you edit the source code of the open source one and are willing to share your patch of course

As I read the Apache license, you are allowed to modify the code, but I see nothing to compel you to distribute the modification.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems?

#6

Post by gusbremm »

I worked for a while on a Mendix app and it felt interesting in the beginning but quickly I started to hate it..

Low code can deliver some features 4x faster but sometimes a stupid feature can take 20x the time just because the low code platform wont support that. Or sometimes the solution is so ugly that the whole project becomes a mess.

If you want to deliver top quality stuff you are constantly fighting the low code limitations.

However, if you are OK with low code limitations it can be benefical.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems?

#7

Post by oneplane »

Generally, no effective SDLC except for when the vendor builds a half-assed version of SCM into their product. Generally no such thing as Low-code + Git.

Most of the systems either don't have the big benefits they claim to have (time spent just flows elsewhere), or they are of limited use (think basic form workflows into a database or spreadsheet).

It's somewhat similar to a 'website builder' where yes, you can build a website, but instead of learning general tools, you're learning builder-specific tools. And instead of solving logic in logic solving tools, you're solving logic in (mostly) sub-optimal tools.

This is essentially the same problem with say Excel and Access; to use those at scale you'll still need to learn a 'variant' of programming and data modelling and it doesn't help much that it's inside of an application instead of inside of an IDE.

In this specific case, I would ask the software engineering team to find out ways to do rapid prototyping with a trade-off in UI quality; you can generally get away with the same principles as OpenAPIV3 spec based data structure and interface generators. You focus on specifying how the application should process and model data, and auto-generate all the required persistence and interface stuff from that.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems?

#9

Post by mkaymalright »

We use Appsmith for a couple of use cases but essentially all it does/we use it for is

- to be a database admin interface for non-engineering users to display and edit a bunch of tables in postgres.

- having an interface around calling internal API's, with a page for input parameters

it's pretty good for these use cases, it allows non-engineering people to do some things that would otherwise require a custom built UI.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems?

#10

Post by speedgoose »

nulbyte wrote: post #4
speedgoose wrote: post #2

I tested Retool a bit, which is great, but it is way too expensive for my projects, so I went with the open-source Appsmith instead. It has been successful, but I recently had to patch it to remove a new annoying «made with appsmith» ad on our applications that can only be disabled on the enterprise edition or if you edit the source code of the open source one and are willing to share your patch of course. Another im…

> if you edit the source code of the open source one and are willing to share your patch of course As I read the Apache license, you are allowed to modify the code, but I see nothing to compel you to distribute the modification.

You are right, you don’t have to.
Post reply on HN