I remember someone saying on HN that what the world needed was a way to make web apps that was as easy as making a Windows form in Visual Studio. Could this be that app?
Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
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Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#12Looks very promising! - Does anybody know what technology stack is being used here? Django + some JS stack for the front end?
Glad to hear it! Some details about the tech stack:
* Front-end code is compiled from Python to JS with Skulpt (http://skulpt.org)
* The back-end code runs in a custom Python sandbox. Calls to server functions go over a secure web socket (this lets us do fun things like returning database rows directly from server functions, rather than faffing with REST APIs all day)
* The built-in database (Data Tables) is based on Postgres, using its JSONB and GIN indexing to create a table you can search efficiently on any column. This also means that things like transactions are properly robust.
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#13Whenever i see these cloud apps that seem like a good idea, I just think of spiralling costs similar to the likes of firebase written about on HN before.
Their pricing page doesn't show anything about usage limits and if it is "per site" or "per domain" or "per project".
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#14Doesn't seem to work with firefox :(
(founder here) Urk? Firefox is an officially supported platform for the editor. What didn't work, and what version of FF are you using? Once you've written an app, it should work in everything since IE11.
(another founder here!)
We've now been in touch by email about this bug, and we'll make sure a fix is pushed ASAP!
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#15Can't help to think about Delphi. Good job! ;-)
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#16Whenever i see these cloud apps that seem like a good idea, I just think of spiralling costs similar to the likes of firebase written about on HN before. Their pricing page doesn't show anything about usage limits and if it is "per site" or "per domain" or "per project".
Pricing is per-developer-seat; we don't limit the number of apps you can build or publish.
Usage limits are pretty soft right now (depends heavily on what you do in your code and how hard you're hammering our servers), but the general intention is to charge you more as you scale up your team, rather than because you got a few thousand users.
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#17I only watched the video, so it is a bit early to judge, but I wonder:
1. Why put that much effort in explaining it takes only 6 minutes in setting up a web app? Anyone who has done any serious web app knows how quickly you can set up a simple app really does not matter much for an app even of moderate size, let alone big ones?
2. Why yet another attempt to abstract away everything and using one language (python) only? What happens when you need to debug nitti-gritty js/css/html/sql?
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#18Whenever i see these cloud apps that seem like a good idea, I just think of spiralling costs similar to the likes of firebase written about on HN before. Their pricing page doesn't show anything about usage limits and if it is "per site" or "per domain" or "per project".
Pricing is per-developer-seat; we don't limit the number of apps you can build or publish. Usage limits are pretty soft right now (depends heavily on what you do in your code and how hard you're hammering our servers), but the general intention is to charge you more as you scale up your team, rather than because you got a few thousand users.
Does Anvil render server-side or is it client-side only?
My issue is if being used for websites, on average our sites get ~50k visitors a month or even spikes with that amount.
The same goes for complexity of the system, for simple html sites it will not matter much but for very dynamic apps this will require a lot of CPU time.
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#19Awesome! I work at Mendix where we've been building something similar for just over 11 years now. Companies in this space (rapid app development for the web) typically target the Enterprise market and are typically not open source, I think that's why they don't get much interest on HN.
The market is heating up though, we are growing fast and our competitors do as well. Moreover, Google (AppMaker) and Microsoft (PowerApps) have entered the race in the last two years.
Looking forward to seeing more of Anvil.
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#20I can see this as an amazing teaching aid too. You can take away all the learning about tech stacks and platforms and various languages and server config etc. for a while and concentrate on developing the idea and developing a process.
Edit: My son is going to love this when he gets home!
It seems good enough that you could push the prototype live as an MVP.
I am interested if you grow to something to the stage where you want to move off this and onto something more customised, do you have access to be able to properly migrate the DB somewhere else?