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Ask HN: Experiences with low-code systems?

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

#61

Post by z9znz »

I suspect there are certain use cases for which low-code systems are well suited, and others where it will either not be expressive enough or will end up being so complex that it would be better/more easily expressed in code.

I spent a few years building data analytic systems for big telcos to reconcile switch and billing data. For this I used the tool my company was selling which was a visual (ugly but very practical) graphical node-based system. You pick the right type of node for a given (stream processing) need, make some configurations (including possibly adjusting the number of inputs and outputs), and then connect things together.

Many of the end results would have been reasonably simple to build in code by an experienced developer, but one of the key benefits of this toolkit was the ability to walk a client through the system, explaining what was going on. The visual nodes and connections were reasonably accessible to non programmers.

An added benefit of this kind of toolkit was the ease of discovering what the data actually looked like and seeing the effects at the output of each node. The outputs also had little number tags which provided surprisingly useful high level information: "How many records did we just cull from the source data with this filter?"

The challenge we encountered was in productionizing these systems. Sometimes they were just tools used to solve a one-time problem, but other times they were intended to become parts of a greater process. (In the latter case, I always felt we should just take the lessons learned and write the final product in code...)

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

#62

Post by rawgabbit »

In my part of the world, IT has settled on Salesforce. We use flows (visual tool) for basic automation. For more complex scenarios, we have to resort to using Apex which is similar to Java programming and Mulesoft which has a GUI front end but you end using a lot of Java. Salesforce also released Mulesoft Composer which is a separate product; Mulesoft Composer is targeted at Admins and lets you connect external systems again using a visual tool.

The business, however, loves loves loves Smartsheet. Smartsheet looks like excel; but we had configured it to power all kinds of business processes/forms/automation/websites. It is pricey though.

Regarding your questions: SLDC is hit or miss. My attitude is to get the business involved early in these low code tools as they are ultimate judge of "correctness".

I don't think we save time. If you have a 100x developer, they can create all of these things much faster than these low code tools. The problem is we don't have 100x developers. If we did, they will probably leave for better jobs. What we do gain is the ability to create things by our junior developers and admins.

The tools are only good as the vendor support. We want the junior developers and admins to reach out to vendor support for issues and training. We don't want the junior developers and admins to become "project managers" and nag the senior developers.

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

#63

Post by alphalima »

jusonchan81 wrote: post #11

So this is not really a low-code system. But we manage a lot of our workloads using Netflix Conductor. Its a great platform that naturally promotes re-use of expensive functions. And it has a lot of resiliency features built in, which avoids a lot of code. There is a bunch of things it supports out of the box which has reduced the amount of code we write and over time we have built a repository of re-usable running w…

That does seem like a neat solution. Does it support user-tasks in workflows (i.e. block until someone clicks a button)?

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

#64

Post by alphalima »

bmhin wrote: post #54

It's hard to think about because I feel like when they work I don't think about them at all. And when they don't work I think about and stew about them excessively. So the good cases I forget about completely and the bad ones are stuck in my memory. SDLC is a frequent pain point. Often non-existent or hacky, e.g. export this giant XML doc and you can re-import it if needed. If any step requires clicking on buttons it…

Thanks for the great comment!

> SDLC is a frequent pain point.

I've dealt with that pain before with other tools (promoting DataDog montiors + dashboards comes to mind). This area seems like it'll be even more painful so I'll definitely be filtering by that critereon.

> On the last question...

My particular use case would be for some human checkpoint in an otherwise-automated system. I'd hope to pull in all the contextual information, provide the decision-maker with a text box and an approve/reject decison.

> Worst part here is I feel like this is really often something that will come with using the product. Often the use cases documented and sold really seem like all you'll need.

Yeah, that's what worries me about low-code. I know it'll be a bit of a slog to do all these full-code, but it's a known quantity.

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

#65

Post by alphalima »

superdisk wrote: post #48

Perhaps one that's a bit off the beaten path, but I've developed a number of games using Multimedia Fusion (now known as Clickteam Fusion). It's a "no-code" system in the sense that you do all programming using a unique checkbox system which has interesting semantics regarding selectors/which objects that certain events interact with. [0] It's super useful for developing for things like game jams, where you have a su…

> but you definitely have to work within the constraints of the system. If you try to push the boundary too much on what's "expected" it becomes painful very quickly

Hah, that's the problem with every framework!

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

#66

Post by alphalima »

oneplane wrote: post #7

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…

You've hit the nail on the head about my reservations.

Regarding your recommendation, were there any libraries that exist already?

Otherwise, I assume that you mean:

1) write some code to derive a CRUD/RPC OpenApiV3 Spec from some data-at-rest spec/JSON Schema other (e.g. RDBMS Table)

2) generate endpoints conforming to that spec and wire it to persistence

3) generate UI components that allow you to drive requests to those endpoints.

4) build something to serve backend + front-end

Those steps look like a low-code system to me?

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

#67

Post by HatchedLake721 »

seyz wrote: post #37
mousetree wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're starting to get to that stage now. We have a UI for Customer Service to manage everything related to a customer at a digital bank. It's becoming quite slow.

Just in case, we work a lot with banks (with >1k users onboarded on one single admin panel) at Forest Admin.

I recognized the name, thank you for jsonapi-serializer!

Any reason you’re not adding maintainers?

Feels sad that one of the most useful JavaScript JSON API spec libraries is dead for 2-3 years :( There are people lined up to support, fix and keep improving it.

https://github.com/SeyZ/jsonapi-serializer/issues/200

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

#68

Post by eeke »

yawnxyz wrote: post #5

I really love Retool, but if you're dealing with a ton of data, it'll bog down their UI really quickly. It's quick to get started to build small apps for special circumstances (like moving files around, approving posts, etc.)

I head up product at Retool. I’m sorry to hear about the issues here. We’ve been heads down on improving the performance of apps like yours by moving work into the server-side, re-architecting parts of our codebase, geolocating our servers closer to users, and a number of other initiatives. We’re releasing these improvements as we prove their efficacy, while other improvements are under more experimental feature flags. If you’re interested, our engineering team would love to get these safely turned on for you—Just reach out to me at eeke@retool.com.

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

#69

Post by anakaine »

mohanarpit wrote: post #23
algo_trader wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For appsmith, were u able to make some dynamic features? e.g. a count down field which count down seconds to zero OR a list display with automatically updates from the source (Ironically, i will happily spend time build a custom back end source, if AS will take care of front end) BTW, playing with appsmith right now, it crushed and is now down for more than 15 minutes

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 automatica…

Hey, thanks for Appsmith. I've just started trialing it.

Got a question: is it possible to operate without something like docker, on Windows? The place I would like to deploy it is a VM, and nested VMs are not a good option with what I have available.

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

#70

Post by rubyist5eva »

yen789 wrote: post #38
rubyist5eva wrote: post #22

We evaluated trying to use appsmith for replacing our handmade admin panel but doing things like setting up pagination for databases was not particularly pleasant, basically writing raw sql with template strings. Yuck. Our app would’ve needed a bunch of new apis added to it to make it workable that we just weren’t willing to invest in at the time so we’re sticking with our plain html pages and smatteringgs of js for…

Have you tried Forest Admin? It generates an admin panel based on your data, and features like pagination, search, dashboards, etc. are available out-of-the-box. It's way faster than building from scratch and even with low-code. It's also secure, FA can't access user data.

Never heard of it but will check it out
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