51–60 of 114 posts
These type of softwares are now increasingly known as BAAS - Backend as a service. You can also find other similar products on the github readme.
This is still in development, and I am using this as backend for two of my other projects. The goals are similar to what you have written, plus more.
One of the things several colleagues have said to me over the years is that Access tended to be a dangerous tool in a large organisation: like Excel but on crack. You end up with a large number of autonomous, undocumented systems built on an ad-hoc basis by personnel who were often not even in a technical role. Personally I think that sounds like a great way to leverage the domain expertise of lots of different emplo…
At ClojureNYC last night I gave a talk about literally this! Here are the slides: https://github.com/hyperfiddle/hypercrud.browser/issues/4
Maybe because writing an Access database still requires a programmer, and you can get better value by hiring a PHP programmer to write two pages and three tables.
Yep, this is what always happens with these types of applications. There was a whole slew of these type of tools in the 90s dubbed '4GL' with the idea they were a level above traditional programming (3GL) where business people could drag &drop their way to a new app. It was a disaster and none of those 4GLs are around anymore. There is no interface that's as easy as sending an email to a developer saying "I need an a…
There are quite a few products that attempt to be a web based equivalent of Access. The two that seem to be the closest to me are Google's AppMaker ( https://developers.google.com/appmaker/ ) and Bubble.is ( https://bubble.is/ ). I call these two out because they both allow for coding when the "default path" runs into a wall, and both include more than just forms and tables. However, they both still have warts. Appma…
One of the things several colleagues have said to me over the years is that Access tended to be a dangerous tool in a large organisation: like Excel but on crack. You end up with a large number of autonomous, undocumented systems built on an ad-hoc basis by personnel who were often not even in a technical role. Personally I think that sounds like a great way to leverage the domain expertise of lots of different emplo…
Every day, some random employee starts tracking items or documents in Access as a personal tool, and then more people in the organization hear about it, features get added, and then the company starts running on it, then it begins to fail and they migrate over to a 'real' ERP system.
One of the things several colleagues have said to me over the years is that Access tended to be a dangerous tool in a large organisation: like Excel but on crack. You end up with a large number of autonomous, undocumented systems built on an ad-hoc basis by personnel who were often not even in a technical role. Personally I think that sounds like a great way to leverage the domain expertise of lots of different emplo…
In a large organization, supporting disjointed business processes (or worse, fragile amateurish integrations) costs more than the software. At scale, consistency matters more than performance variance in some areas.
Access is also a nightmare from a security standpoint. AFAIK that's why it was abandoned; there was no way to keep the functionality and easy defaults that users liked while making it secure. It scares companies shitless to have critical financial data sitting in Access databases...
> ... a simple platform for creating CRUD apps. It doesn’t seem like an unachievable goal to me: you need the ability to create forms, design database tables, manage user permissions, manage data workflow (ie: send an sms if , seek approval from for ), and view/search data.
For the most basic needs, Excel with macros and connections to data-sources like csv files is perfectly adequate. But you want multiple users, multiple forms, data workflows...
In the microsoft ecosystem, the next step up would be using .NET entity-framework with a database like sql-server express (or even localdb). Your application would then consist of a C# or VB .NET desktop application using wpf or forms.
I think you want something in-between Excel and a full blown .NET application. That's a pretty narrow market.