On this page: https://alan-platform.com/pages/tuts/bottom-up.html The ASCII art isn't rendering correctly. (In Chrome on a tablet.)
Damn, I was so proud of that. You should bookmark it so you can enjoy it on a big screen later ;)
Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform
91–100 of 178 posts
Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform
#92Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform
#93All states should be defined? Then how to write an app takes two numbers and returns the sum?
Check this for an example: https://github.com/M-industries/AlanProjectTemplate/blob/mas...
Thank you for the example. I just don't want to be picky but that is church encoding. To represent a number, say 1234567, you will need million items in a list.
Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, there is no magic :) When you set up the users at the top of the model file, you specify which property is the password.
Specifying something as password hashing as (sha256? salted sha256?) without telling it to seems like magic to me. So to clarify, it's this password: declaration which tells the framework to hash the input? users dynamic : . 'Users' password : . 'Password' interfaces root { } numerical-types Is this defined anywhere within the project or is this framework magic? (Or "glue" if you don't like the term magic). password…
The line `password : . 'Password'` points at the password property, which tells the framework to hash it. What kind of hashing isn't something you should have to specify or worry about. It's a strong salted hash and we'd like to make it even better at some point, but that's firmly in the realm of the framework implementation.
Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform
#95Hey Koen, congrats on you and Corno making front-page on HN! I can definitely confirm for others reading this that it indeed has been something like 10 years in the making; I was working with a prototype of it 8-9 years ago and found those data models so nice that I actually reimplemented the core idea in a repository on GitHub, though it didn't really go anywhere except for my own web site. I have also been able to…
Hi Chris, how are you!? It's been a while man. We've definitely dug into it a lot deeper than last time you worked on it. As you say, once you get how the models work it sticks with you :)
I've been well. Landed a software job with a company called IntegriShield doing a sort of internet rent-a-cop work, now am writing apps for a mechanical contractor called US Engineering -- turns out the construction business always runs on razor-thin margins which is kinda nice because, like, reducing cost by 1% when construction margins are only ~5% causes a 20% improvement in net profit.
This is great work, and I think you're burying one lede, which is that it looks like you've embedded a declarative permissions model in this thing, and I built one of those and the time saved can be huge when authorization is handled at the model level rather than everywhere in the business logic.
Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform
#96I've long thought that this is the way applications should be built. 90% of what we do as app developers could be automated away. This looks really promising. That having been said, I'd like to echo some of the other comments here. You need better docs. As an app developer, I want to see some things right away: 1. What's the server written in? Can I see the code? It isn't clear which of your Github repos contain the…
Thanks for the feedback, this is exactly what we're looking for here. Perhaps some of this is "how to launch a platform 101", but we can't guess all the concerns everyone may have. Also, we're not necessarily looking to really kick start adoption for a wide audience right now. The platform lacks maturity on a number of levels to properly support that. We'll continue to work on our documentation and clarify some of th…
"Pretty apps isn't what you'd use Alan for"
Wouldn't a visual model bulder speed up the creation of all those declarative data models?
Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform
#97I've long thought that this is the way applications should be built. 90% of what we do as app developers could be automated away. This looks really promising. That having been said, I'd like to echo some of the other comments here. You need better docs. As an app developer, I want to see some things right away: 1. What's the server written in? Can I see the code? It isn't clear which of your Github repos contain the…
I agree that 90% of app should be written this way.
I think the problem is that clients think of software development as something analogous to design or architecture. If we took a more utilitarian approach to software and a more expert-driven design process, we could bring costs down and reliability would go way up.
This is absolutely the way to go for the future. Computers need to be quickly and easily programmable in a standardized way that anyone can learn in highschool and still use daily for at least a few decades into their professional lives.
Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform
#98I've long thought that this is the way applications should be built. 90% of what we do as app developers could be automated away. This looks really promising. That having been said, I'd like to echo some of the other comments here. You need better docs. As an app developer, I want to see some things right away: 1. What's the server written in? Can I see the code? It isn't clear which of your Github repos contain the…
Thanks for the feedback, this is exactly what we're looking for here. Perhaps some of this is "how to launch a platform 101", but we can't guess all the concerns everyone may have. Also, we're not necessarily looking to really kick start adoption for a wide audience right now. The platform lacks maturity on a number of levels to properly support that. We'll continue to work on our documentation and clarify some of th…
I second the GP's sentiment regarding code availability. Most of your repositories are MIT-licensed, yet you claim that the platform will be non-free (CC-BY-NC). Could you please clarify whether the server source code is or will be made available under this license?
Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform
#99Hey Koen, congrats on you and Corno making front-page on HN! I can definitely confirm for others reading this that it indeed has been something like 10 years in the making; I was working with a prototype of it 8-9 years ago and found those data models so nice that I actually reimplemented the core idea in a repository on GitHub, though it didn't really go anywhere except for my own web site. I have also been able to…
// inside of here, params has type {objectguid: string}, Should that be {objectguid: guid}? If not, where did the string come from there?
I don't think TypeScript has a native GUID type, but if I am wrong about that please tell me as it will make my code more type-safe.
The `string` type here comes from a mapping that the router is using. That is, the router ultimately type-evaluates a `ValueOfType` to `string`. But because it's a runtime object, the router can also, at runtime, validate that URL param, "did they actually give me a UUID?" -- and sanitize it, e.g. "convert all UUIDs to lowercase."
(In fact the benefit of having this TypeScript type at runtime is even bigger than that. With Express.js, the router can rewrite the route param so that the route doesn't even match if you don't provide a UUID, which matters because there is often a lot of accidental ambiguity in HTTP APIs -- but here you can embed the UUID regex into Express paths. The router can then also do some other trickery like confirm at initial load time that all params in URLs match params in this `params` dict, and it can convert all of its routes to OpenAPI/Swagger docs so that you can define another route which just gives you your OpenAPI JSON. Literally in what I have written the above would be a type error because the `Router` class would complain that `params` has the wrong type because the `objectguid` descriptor needs a key called `doc` which is a string for parameter documentation for OpenAPI.)
Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm disconcerted after reading this thread, seeing that some people somehow think that "low code" means "low-level code" (really?) and mistaking a collared shirt for legs. I'm going to assume it's because this post was made early in the morning and no one has had their coffee yet.
Your application is awesome! However, the logo to me did look like a blood bag with some yellow liquid in it and two tubes sticking out at the bottom. (When shown on white background, you cannot see hair on the guy's head - https://alan-platform.com/pages/tuts/introducing.html ) Anyway, the program looks very intuitive in its purpose and goal!
Yes, a blood bag is exactly the impression I got. I was like "oh, okay. this represents the 'lifeblood' of development" or something.