I'd love a TypeScript/NodeJS version of this, this looks really neat but I prefer TypeScript over Python.
Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
51–60 of 119 posts
Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
#52I am surprised that lack of control and customizability over the frontend is being billed as a feature. I've built multiple internal tools like those in the example section, and even with a solid framework like react-admin, one of the first requests you're going to get from internal stakeholders is tweaks to the UI. It's a myth that internal users aren't as demanding as external stakeholders. If anything, they can be…
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Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
#53I've done plenty of internal web apps with Python's old cgi module and it's really about the simplest approach. Too bad the cgi module has recently been removed from Python due to some weird neurosis about underused modules. It's still possible to side-load it from someplace though.
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Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
#54I am surprised that lack of control and customizability over the frontend is being billed as a feature. I've built multiple internal tools like those in the example section, and even with a solid framework like react-admin, one of the first requests you're going to get from internal stakeholders is tweaks to the UI. It's a myth that internal users aren't as demanding as external stakeholders. If anything, they can be…
that’s a fair point.
what would be the minimum set of customization required to satisfy the majority of the tweaks requested by internal users?
would it be sufficient to offer themes (dark/light modes), a custom logo, and control over font sizes? or, is it more fundamental, like adding your own css and changing the size/positioning of components?
Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
#55why the internal moniker ...what stops this from being "external" facing?
I am so confused about this too. retool, tooljet, budibase - why is everyone doing this? Best I can figure out is that no one has found a pricing structure that works otherwise, which would be rather sad if true.
Because it lets them establish a beach-head in a less-demanding market, but one with deep pockets. It also lets them create corporate relationships. With all this revenue they keep adding features until the product is more general purpose and can be used to build anything. If they try to boil the ocean to begin with, they'll fail. This is a more pragmatic, staged approach.
Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
#56I am surprised that lack of control and customizability over the frontend is being billed as a feature. I've built multiple internal tools like those in the example section, and even with a solid framework like react-admin, one of the first requests you're going to get from internal stakeholders is tweaks to the UI. It's a myth that internal users aren't as demanding as external stakeholders. If anything, they can be…
that’s a fair point. what would be the minimum set of customization required to satisfy the majority of the tweaks requested by internal users? would it be sufficient to offer themes (dark/light modes), a custom logo, and control over font sizes? or, is it more fundamental, like adding your own css and changing the size/positioning of components?
Even your "more fundamental" examples are just scratching the surface.
I know you're a Chief Technology Officer not a Chief Product Officer or Chief Sales Officer, but if you're not already getting an earful from prospects or clients about wishlist items on the frontend, gird your loins, because it's coming.
Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
that’s a fair point. what would be the minimum set of customization required to satisfy the majority of the tweaks requested by internal users? would it be sufficient to offer themes (dark/light modes), a custom logo, and control over font sizes? or, is it more fundamental, like adding your own css and changing the size/positioning of components?
Even your "more fundamental" examples are just scratching the surface. I know you're a Chief Technology Officer not a Chief Product Officer or Chief Sales Officer, but if you're not already getting an earful from prospects or clients about wishlist items on the frontend, gird your loins, because it's coming.
thanks for the heads up!
i feel like the challenge would be to find a subset of customizations that would work for most users.
Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
#58It 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.
Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
#59Did you guys pivoted Dropbase from CSV analytics to internal app builder? Interesting move. Internal.io just sunsetted. Maybe Dropbase has what it takes and finding its P/M fit.
yes, that’s us. glad to see you remember our previous iteration :) internal app builder is certainly a challenging market to break into, but we believe we have something interesting to offer and are quite optimistic about our approach. were you a customer of the previous dropbase version (csv to database)? thanks again for your interest, it is always appreciated!
Oh man, I would love to compare notes.
I pivoted in the reverse direction from:
https://github.com/pycob/pyvibe
To
Re: Show HN: Dropbase – Build internal web apps with just Python
#60Looks cool! I think there is a huge need for tools like this, especially as AI turns more subject matter experts into programmers who can code a bit of python. At my company we have recently started using NiceGUI which is a python wrapper for quasars+tailwind and seems like a very similar product. I’ve found it has a great level of abstraction that enables you to do Python only web App development without too much ma…
NiceGUI looks interesting, reminds me of reflex.dev a little bit. what kind of apps are you building with it?
I work on a Bioinformatics team, so we are a bunch of programmers, but not fully-fledged software engineers. We know Python well but have no front-end experience.
Some examples:
- Another non-technical team needs to know if our test covers specific genetic variants. The code to answer this is 10 lines of Python + a 100 line CSV. We can solve this with a CLI on our local computers but to serve it to the other team was a huge blocker until we started using NiceGUI. Now its 10 lines of Python + 10 more lines of NiceGUI Python and they have a website to go to so they can self-serve the answer to that question. All done in a 2-4 hours.
- More complicated, we have a workflow where we want to select data from a database via a series of filters, run some automated algorithms on it to generate new data, denormalize and view the data, manipulate it using an Excel-like interface, and then update the database with the edits that were made. NiceGUI + their AG Grid integration let me build an application that has all the great GUI features of Excel when it comes to grid-based data manipulation but is fully programmable with 99% Python (and like 1% JavaScript).
- I also built a data hub that integrates and displays data from a bunch of our different data sources and displays it based on some queries. If I can write a tool in Python to do something, I can now easily deploy an internal app that does that too, without knowing any front-end code. It even has the flexibility that when needed I could dive into a bit of HTML with the help of ChatGPT to embed iframes of PDF files getting served directly from S3 links.
The great thing is that this is all done in Python, all version controlled in the same repo as the rest of our codebase, uses open source software, and can be deployed easily within our VPC using terraform+docker. So it's a very maintainable dev ops experience compared to most other no-code/low-code tools, while at the same time enabling people who have programming (but not really engineering) experience and are subject matter experts in other areas to build fairly complex and customized GUIs.
It's also using FastAPI under the hood so you can implement some things at that layer as well. I know that's how they suggest implementing Auth, but I haven't dabbled with that as well.