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

Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 146 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends

#121

Post by Closi »

hypermachine wrote: post #91
Closi wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, VBA & Excel serve a fundamentally different use-case for Microsoft. Building lots of hacky applications using spreadsheets was never the intention, and does not result in good applications. Access... I agree and miss it, but I can see why they wanted to replace it. You couldn't build scalable applications with it because of database locking, and to do the sort of stuff you can do in PowerApps you had to resort to…

Their biggest mistake was not scaling the VBA/Excel/Access stack beyond desktop and updating it. Where is the WinUI integration for VBA? The product and language was fine but it has been abandoned by Microsoft. It is easy to learn and use but they never tried to make it a cross platform technology.

I don’t think that’s a mistake - VBA in the browser sounds like an awful technology that I want nothing to do with!

Also most VBA code already written is inherently locked into the windows API and COM framework so isn’t multi-platform by design. Code written in VBA on Excel for Windows often doesn’t port across to Mac without errors because there is little abstraction from the host OS. That’s why the replacement technology is a cross-platform JavaScript API for Excel (that will eventually allow fully cross platform macros).

It does have WinUI integration via winforms, but again porting winforms to mobile and web would be a huge technical challenge and be very ugly (or break compatibility).

Re: Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends

#122

Post by arey_abhishek »

algo_trader wrote: post #120
arey_abhishek wrote: post #12

I'm a founder of Appsmith that has already been mentioned here. It's an open source project to help you build CRUD UI on top on any database(MySQL, Postgres included) or API. We give UI components to create forms, charts, tables, etc. GitHub link: https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

It looks great. So impressive. I am going through the "Create Standup Application" tutorial. Did u use a specific library to add the hints/popups or is it all manually patched in?

Thanks! We built it custom because we needed some specific interactions. You can find the code here: https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith/tree/release/app/cli...

Re: Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends

#123

Post by hypermachine »

Closi wrote: post #121
hypermachine wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their biggest mistake was not scaling the VBA/Excel/Access stack beyond desktop and updating it. Where is the WinUI integration for VBA? The product and language was fine but it has been abandoned by Microsoft. It is easy to learn and use but they never tried to make it a cross platform technology.

I don’t think that’s a mistake - VBA in the browser sounds like an awful technology that I want nothing to do with! Also most VBA code already written is inherently locked into the windows API and COM framework so isn’t multi-platform by design. Code written in VBA on Excel for Windows often doesn’t port across to Mac without errors because there is little abstraction from the host OS. That’s why the replacement tech…

Join our mailing list :) Give us a try when we launch, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Re: Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends

#124

Post by [deleted] »

shireboy wrote: post #27

I’ve explored lots of these and implemented a few with customers who wanted their “business analysts” to be able to build apps. My experience has been the “non technical” people can’t do these either and wind up getting developers to try, who are then frustrated with lock-in to a relatively unknown tool or expensive BPM suite. To a developer, these are often “death by a thousand clicks”. Even Visual Studio for the mo…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends

#125

Post by pdimitar »

Nilef wrote: post #14

I keep a list of the best of the best for these tools, aimed at the absolute non-tech end of the market https://nocode.tech/category/internal-tools https://www.nocode.tech/category/app-builders Lists include both SaaS and self-hosted options

Useful collections, thank you.

Re: Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends

#126

Post by anakaine »

shireboy wrote: post #27

I’ve explored lots of these and implemented a few with customers who wanted their “business analysts” to be able to build apps. My experience has been the “non technical” people can’t do these either and wind up getting developers to try, who are then frustrated with lock-in to a relatively unknown tool or expensive BPM suite. To a developer, these are often “death by a thousand clicks”. Even Visual Studio for the mo…

Visual studio also largely trended towards an MVC model + ORM which made implementing forms on a front end an absolute nightmare and led to a lot of security issues, poor usability issues, and lack of agility in changing and updating complex forms with conditional form logic etc. Not to mention that user security integration using identity providers is also an epic headache.

There is a middle ground, and that’s why low code / no code is so popular. Often a business does not need the full flexibility and nonsense that comes along with something like that.

Horses for courses. If off the shelf drag and drop helps you build enough to get your idea up and running and start using it / making money, then that’s far better than being lost neck deep in a code pile and not getting up and running. Once you’ve got the funds, then look at transitioning.

Re: Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends

#128

Post by anaganisk »

shivam-dev wrote: post #89

You can give https://frappeframework.com a try, it is MIT licensed, really powerful and comprehensive, excellent for making CRUD apps. Also has a PaaS offering on https://frappecloud.com Full Disclosure: I worked at Frappe for the last 2 years

Frappe feels too heavy to get started. Ive tried it out few times over years. The flow seems very confusing for me to get started.

Re: Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends

#129

Post by akash_cm »

algo_trader wrote: post #120
arey_abhishek wrote: post #12

I'm a founder of Appsmith that has already been mentioned here. It's an open source project to help you build CRUD UI on top on any database(MySQL, Postgres included) or API. We give UI components to create forms, charts, tables, etc. GitHub link: https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

It looks great. So impressive. I am going through the "Create Standup Application" tutorial. Did u use a specific library to add the hints/popups or is it all manually patched in?

Library might be an overkill I guess. It is an absolute positioned element. There is a config for each step as to what to show at each step in the popup. The animation at the end makes use of https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-web

Re: Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends

#130

Post by seektable »

codechoir wrote: post #115

Thank you all for the many great answers! Definitely a lot to look at! Currently Appsmith (and/or) Lowdefy seem to fit best for me. In case you're interested, these are all the products/resources given so far: http://superset.apache.org https://adsharma.github.io/flattools-programs/ https://adsharma.github.io/fquery/ https://apex.oracle.com https://app.spanrr.com https://arctype.com https://baserow.io https://bubble.…

I see BI tools here (like Superset, Metabase etc) -- for use-cases when updates are not needed, read-only access to DB may be organized with https://www.seektable.com (not open source, but has 'personal usage' free tier).
Post reply on HN