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

Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–119 of 119 posts

Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python

#111

Post by jimmyechan »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #83

So it's an agent that phones home and exfiltrates all your sensitive corporate data to the public cloud? Lol. I understand that SaaS is the only way to monetize software projects in 2023, but this whole setup is not defensible.

Lol not sure if your comment was meant as a joke, but wanted to clarify in any case to clear up any misunderstanding: We don't exfiltrate your sensitive corporate data.

The self-hosted client talks to the self-hosted worker, the latter which is the server responsible for querying and processing your data, and storing your creds. So basically your sensitive corporate data flows from your self-hosted worker directly to your self-hosted client. There's no funny business in between. Only the worker can initiate calls to our backend API (not the other way around), and you can easily inspect our network requests and payloads. We do store app metadata, UI properties, and the names of the columns you configure in your tables. The worker sends periodic health checks to our backend. Hope that clears things up!

Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python

#112

Post by jimmyechan »

jstummbillig wrote: post #91
jimmyechan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually quite encouraging for us as product developers (although maybe it's not a good thing if end users don't get good tools). It just means there's a lot more room to grow. I wouldn't say we've given up on external, but there's definitely a part of us that's hesitant to communicate the product as a "build anything" app so early. The fact that you think that could actually be an obvious differentiator is q…

I understand. Maybe a niche for you, that might be interesting to explore,from my latest personal experience: Managing a medical business, including a combined portal for patients and providers. For the patients, you might need submission process, you might need a place for people to see or cancel their next appointments, fill out a form or upload some pictures from other, while also making this information available…

That's an interesting use case. Thanks for sharing. I think I understand your point better after reading this. I agree that having to pay xx$ indefinitely for presumably many end users who will only fill up the form once (or very rarely) doesn't make sense. We don't have a solution to this just yet, but I have a couple of ideas on how to tackle this.

PS. CRUDy sounds like a fun and quite literal name for an app builder!

Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python

#113

Post by ayazhan »

blandry wrote: post #64
ayazhan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these are great examples, thanks for sharing! the second one is particularly interesting. python seems like a perfect fit for that use case. are there any limitations you encounter with NiceGUI? do you need a user permission feature or does each user get admin access? can you see it scaling up easily?

Auth is a big limitation. It's not a built-in component, they have an example [1] using the FastAPI layer for auth, but I haven't had the time to try implementing it. It's definitely not something you get out of the box with NiceGUI. For scaling, I am viewing it mostly as an internal tool builder. I wouldn't recommend it for external applications. So as far as scaling an internal app I think it works fine. Their webs…

got it. thank you for your feedback, i really appreciate it!

Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python

#114

Post by jimmyechan »

Uptrenda wrote: post #88
jimmyechan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the code is in a docker image, published on docker hub. It's prepackaged so it's easy to set up with docker-compose. The repo mostly has the docker files needed to self-host the dropbase worker and client. As you said, it's a bizarre, but not uncommon way to distribute. We're not technically open source at the moment, but considering evolving into source-available, and maybe eventually move up to an open source…

So does the docker file have something like python bytecode files in it or actual source? If it has source aren't you worried about people leaking it?

It has actual source for the worker. We aren't worried about it being leaked because we are not particularly trying to hide it in the first place. We will probably make source available to paying customers on request if they want to verify that their sensitive data only moves between self-hosted worker and self-hosted client.

The other reason is that internally we've always thought that we'd eventually gravitate to an open model when the time is right i.e. at least until after we've figured out the product.

Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python

#115

Post by danielmarkbruce »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #106
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi - sorry for the random note - but would you mind chatting about this?

Sure, what do you want to know? We can also take this discussion to email or mastodon or whatever.

Great, much appreciated - i'm trying to understand the screen scraping of gas volumes, to trade nat gas. My email is my username at the very popular google email service.

Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python

#116

Post by cjohnson318 »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #115
cjohnson318 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, what do you want to know? We can also take this discussion to email or mastodon or whatever.

Great, much appreciated - i'm trying to understand the screen scraping of gas volumes, to trade nat gas. My email is my username at the very popular google email service.

10-4

Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python

#117

Post by nylonstrung »

sirjaz wrote: post #58

It would be great if this could generate a desktop app rather than another webapp that I need to host somewhere. We need to focus on desktop apps again.

Felt.dev is any easy way to write flutter desktop apps with Python

I looked at alternatives like tkinter and it was the most compelling

Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python

#119

Post by jimmyechan »

YaBa wrote: post #118

Looks nice, but I'll pass and stick to streamlit.io as they don't require an account and a connection between MY app and YOUR server for some misterious reason which is not clear anywhere.

Streamlit is a great. Despite the fact that we are both Python-focused, the use cases for the two products are mostly different at the moment. When it comes to triggering tasks/actions, updating databases, processing data, and talking to APIs, you’ll find Dropbase the more convenient of the two.
Post reply on HN