Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems?

Retool works well -- they have their own version of SDLC in the $10 plan (staging versions of resources.) If you hook that up to something like Neon (https://neon.tech/), you can have staging branches of a database, as well.

The issue I have with many of these products is that a lot of the logic should actually sit closer to the backend (ie. better REST APIs, etc.) If your engineering team is managing the backend anyways, it shouldn't be a huge issue maybe?

I made an investment here (moving the non-UI logic closer to the database) but it's too early to really see if it will work.

Hey, creator of Appsmith here. Thanks for trying out the product.

To answer your first question; yes, it's possible to build dynamic apps that can countdown the seconds to zero or build a timer dynamically. The sample application: https://app.appsmith.com/app/input-widget/input-counter-reva... shows a counter. In this example, while a user is required to click a button, this can be modified to be triggered automatically every 1 sec.

It's currently not possible to power the UI via websockets yet. This is an open feature request that we are yet to implement.

Having said that, I'm sorry that Appsmith crashed for you. Were you trying us out on Appsmith Cloud (https://app.appsmith.com) or were you self-hosting Appsmith via Docker/k8s?

Please feel free to email me at arpit [at] appsmith.com & we'll help you out succeed with the product.

Trying to use Microsoft Power Apps to build a "canvas" app. I was attracted by the Azure AD integration but quickly discovered that it does not support developer collaboration. I thought that I might be able to use thier component library to enable collaboration but was rebuffed instantly by the fact that you can't place a data table control/component on a custom component. Now I'm cursing myself for getting sucked into yet another shitty Microsoft platform.

It's critical that; what ever you're trying to accomplish in a low-code environment; can be accomplished with minimal abstraction-based concepts, like variables and methods. You environment should be as easy / hard as Excel programming.

In the 1980s there was a major effort to make programming intuitive through visual-based programming tools. There was even a journal dedicated to visual programming. I happened to read through some of these articles in 2002-03 for a college project.

The conclusion in the last journal was that programming requires concepts that can only be expressed in words. Visual (intuitive) programming eventually failed because it wasn't expressive enough.

At the same time, Excel took off. Although it doesn't have "variables," it does allow for expression of abstract concepts.

> 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.

IMO, make sure the team that's going to manage these apps is involved in choosing the toolchain and has complete buy-in. (Or at least has a healthy skepticism.) There's nothing worse than an edict coming from down on high to use a bad tool.

Also, keep in mind that, if you're using well-educated software engineers; lightweight scripts in languages like Python, Javascript (via NodeJS), LINQPad (lightweight C#), ect can go very far. Because you're working with mature languages, you can minimize your technology risk. When I was at Intel, we had a rather robust batching system for VBScript. It could call into custom COM objects, usually written in C++ or C#, when needed.

I've been using Bubble for about 5 years now, and even though no-code gets a lot of hate in HN, I've personally been able to help clients get their projects pushed to market, each in about a month on average.

You can get a responsive interface ready to go pretty fast and it does scale if you know how to design DB schemas, you can also go pretty wild with the custom APIs to integrate more traditional functions.

By default you've always got a staging and prod environment.

Higher tier plan do enable rollback to previous deployments [Up to a year I believe].

If you're looking to test out an idea or MVP then it's a great tool to get it in users hands, and it does scale.

Avoiding unworkable complexity really comes down to the developer / team you choose and their ability to develop the project with a structured approach.