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

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

#91

Post by jstummbillig »

jimmyechan wrote: post #43
jstummbillig wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware how most companies external apps look like? Here's how: They don't. What you compete with, what you have to beat, is not "something custom branded and more flexible". It's nothing at all. Cutting yourself out of that market with a tool that would easily be powerful and user friendly enough to fill this gap does not make any sense to me, if that is in fact your true reason. (And also I don't understand h…

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 internally, with doctors being able to document therapies and such.

Nothing fancy; I would hardly call it "build anything", it's all fairly CRUDy and on the face could be very effectively handled by all retool-alikes. (In fact budibase for example could have easily filled the need from a technical standpoint – but having to pay xx$ indefinitely per "customer" just does not work out, when you see most of them only once a year and maybe only once total, while having to keep records for many years.)

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

#92

Post by crucialfelix »

ayazhan wrote: post #47
kak3a wrote: post #45

Did 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!

I was hoping you were the hardcore techno label. What a pivot!

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

#93

Post by lysecret »

That looks fantastic! I own a startup where we used to relay he-vea-ly on retool (until we could automate most of the Retool work with ChatGpt haha).

I would have tried out your approach if it was out back then, I am much more well-versed in Python than JS. Having some way to write code in files, and then link it to the table structure makes a lot of sense (having lots of spaghetti code all over the place was one of the core issues of Retool, also it became slooooow at some point). Simplifying to a table + sidebar view is a very good idea (that's all we ever did).

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

#94

Post by devjab »

joshstrange wrote: post #51

I'd love a TypeScript/NodeJS version of this, this looks really neat but I prefer TypeScript over Python.

I really like Typescript, but this is a really weird thing to say in relation to building web-apps in a single language considering that is one of the primary reasons to pick Typescript as a language. It’s not the only reason, but if Python, Go or whatever you love had the ability to do with the web what Typescript already does, then I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be working with Typescript, and I actually consider Typescript to be one of the best modern languages. But really, Python or Go would probably take over the world if they had the same capabilities for dom manipulation.

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

#96

Post by zlg_codes »

urban_alien wrote: post #37
zlg_codes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that irritates me about some languages. I get the intention of keeping a clean language, but for something as foundational and basic as CGI... what's the real problem in keeping it there? It's not like CGI itself has changed much in the past 20 years... I've written some stuff in Python but it seems like keeping up with Python and its near-infinite PEPs is half the job. They still can't get on the s…

Not strange at all! Leave those assumptions behind, take a look at symfony/console and minicli. PHP is not shiny or snarky as Python, but resilient and "boring". The "dirtness" that you are feeling is just a way to keep those insufferable people that you mentioned out.

I mean, to some degree I see where you're coming from. PHP extensions can be written in C, so you can drop down to lower level as needed. Hardly different than Python in that regard. PHP is just something I've always just used in a Web serving context, so pre-populated $_GET, $_POST, etc.

I would hope argv and argc at least are passed by default in PHP programs on the command line. New experiment unlocked I guess.

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

#97

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

Chainlit is my new favorite Python webapp framework, it’s especially geared toward UI for LLM chat apps. (It has nothing to do with LangChain fortunately, though it does support it and the name probably is inspired by it).

There are unique challenges in making a decent looking chat app. State management is one such. Streamlit’s approach is to rerun the script on every action, which means your code needs to be aware of this, and this usually results in headaches and spaghetti code. Chainlit has a clean approach — I don’t know what they do under the hood but at least from a dev POV it’s far simpler.

I’d be interested to see how a basic chat app is built with Dropbase so I can compare.

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

#98

Post by jimmyechan »

lysecret wrote: post #93

That looks fantastic! I own a startup where we used to relay he-vea-ly on retool (until we could automate most of the Retool work with ChatGpt haha). I would have tried out your approach if it was out back then, I am much more well-versed in Python than JS. Having some way to write code in files, and then link it to the table structure makes a lot of sense (having lots of spaghetti code all over the place was one of…

Thanks! You’re spot on about our approach! Python, binding code files to UI, table+sidebar.

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

#99

Post by FrankyFire »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #39
ayazhan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for the feedback! i'm curious, how critical are graphs for your internal tools and what are some examples of their use?

Pretty darn critical! I built a service a few years ago to scrape natural gas volumes from different refineries and my client wanted that data plotted over time. Another project collected and displayed wellhead pressure data. Oh yeah, maps are also super important, and being able to overlay different statistics and or graphics over them.

I've had the need for things like this very often. But we had multiple metrics to store and visualize, we went with InfluxDB and Grafana for that purpose. Maybe one could create an integration with at least InfluxDB, because it is great for time series.

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

#100

Post by jimmyechan »

3abiton wrote: post #95

How does it compare with other tools like flask and django?

Flask and Django are web frameworks that are more geared towards general app development - you could build anything with them. Dropbase is an app builder that makes it easy to build certain kinds of app: internal apps used to support customers, business operations, build admin panels, or trigger tasks or processing jobs. You can’t build absolutely anything you’d want with us, but for a narrow set of uses cases, you can build it very quickly.
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