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

Show HN: I built an open-source SwiftUI app with an Airtable back end

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–47 of 47 posts

Re: Show HN: I built an open-source SwiftUI app with an Airtable back end

#41

Post by specialist »

latchkey wrote: post #16

I went through something like this. I was thinking oh... airtable saves me from having to develop the crud aspects of my app! Boy was I wrong. For super super basic stuff, Airtable is fine to code against their API. But as soon as you get into anything more complicated, you are going to get screwed. They have a 5 concurrent connection limit and no real transactions. Want to insert 6 rows quickly across two tables? No…

I've always wondered why there's no HTTP tunneling for misc RDBMS protocols. For example, a MIME-Type for MS SQL Server Tabular Data Stream (TDS).

Re: Show HN: I built an open-source SwiftUI app with an Airtable back end

#42

Post by whoisjuan »

ElFitz wrote: post #31
whoisjuan wrote: post #3

I already use Airtable as a backend for some small internal tools. It definitely does the job but there are some moments where I feel it might be easier and more flexible just to create something on Firebase. From an API perspective storing and retrieving objects in both is equally as easy. The only reason I went with Airtable is because I needed a GUI to add data manually.

Perhaps you should look into Forest Admin? (for the GUI) They have a free open-source tool. Never got to use it because I'm mainly running on DynamoDB, but heard lots of good things about it

I didn't know about this tool. Looks pretty nice. Thanks for sharing.

P.S: Saving a Google search for people who come across this thread: https://www.forestadmin.com/

Re: Show HN: I built an open-source SwiftUI app with an Airtable back end

#43

Post by cerberusss »

fiveSpeedManual wrote: post #12

Oh very cool! Love the idea of using a third-party service to store data for simple projects, mobile apps included! If anyone is looking for a similar solution, a place to dump data for personal projects, check out Pantry ( https://getpantry.cloud/ ). It lets you store JSON and has a simple API.

Very interesting. Current Swift capabilities make this extremely easy to implement in an iOS app.

Re: Show HN: I built an open-source SwiftUI app with an Airtable back end

#44

Post by bloudermilk »

kine wrote: post #20
bloudermilk wrote: post #17

This is a great concept! I'm not surprised to see you getting flak for building on Airtable, but as a "real developer" leaning heavily on low/no code lately I wanted to share how well it's worked for our open source team over the last few months. In terms of scale, it has supported dozens of editors, hundreds of public submissions, and several thousand rows of data. We have also successfully scripted a number of use…

lol "real developer." I was the Director of Engineering for Bump, a YCW18 company. I've run mobile teams as well. I just wanted to mix two tools together, no need to hop into who's real and who's not a real developer here. If you want more: https://linkedin.com/in/zackshapiro

Apologies if I wasn't clear, but I was trying to defend you not offend you. In my experience, a lot of people hate on Airtable for being a toy, but I've had a great experience with it. I really like what you built!

Re: Show HN: I built an open-source SwiftUI app with an Airtable back end

#46

Post by raywu »

davyson wrote: post #6

This is really cool! I’ll definitely take a look at this and maybe fork it when we get onto looking at native apps. We have built a web app ( https://stacker.app ) for people who want to use an Airtable backend.

Hi davyson - is Staker responsive on mobile?

Re: Show HN: I built an open-source SwiftUI app with an Airtable back end

#47

Post by seancoleman »

pezo1919 wrote: post #26
seancoleman wrote: post #18

Airtable-as-a-Database is absolutely delightful. It comes with an advanced admin back-end for other team members to view and manage data. For many apps, instead of starting with RDBMS tables, I consider Airtable and strategically move to an RDBMS where Airtable doesn't scale (organizationally, latency, security, row-count, etc.) I've most recently built https://design.org using Airtable. I think it's performant and r…

What does Airtable give you over gsheets for you? I use gsheets but I am interested.

The primary feature is true table-to-table relationships that mimic an RDMS.
Post reply on HN