Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

anvil.works

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 207 posts

Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

#151

Post by mcintyre1994 »

rahoulb wrote: post #87
metalliqaz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see the equivalence. I'm not contracting with Anvil for development or support. I'm basically buying a tool, in this case a tool that is more expensive than my hosting costs.

Well - two areas. One, if you're using it commercially, it's going to pay for itself pretty quickly. I rarely do client projects for less than several thousand pounds; I reckon I could probably churn a lot of them out using this in half the time. Two if you're not using it commercially, it's still a very low cost; maybe more than pure hosting but it does a lot more than just hosting.

Honest question, this looks awesome but how would a contractor justify using it? Would you somehow swallow the risk of them going out of business for whatever reason and promise a rewrite for clients (is that something you can get insured for?) or would clients just be okay with the risk? It seems like you'd have to have already bought enterprise to be able to run this without them from what I can tell?

Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

#152

Post by blunte »

meredydd wrote: post #16
tmikaeld wrote: post #13

Whenever 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.

It is this lack of clarity (published limits) that scares many of us. It basically says that we won't know when we'll be cut off or shut down, but we'll find out when it happens!

So if we build something that becomes wildly successful, we could suddenly be in a world of hurt if our site is deemed too heavy and we're throttled or worse. It would be like Pokemon Go - big explosion, lots of tiny pieces, customers gone.

I urge you to have some kind of professional plan with guaranteed tiers. Otherwise, only naive people or people who really don't care about the future will use it (outside of the prototyping case everyone else is mentioning).

On the other hand, it would be the perfect tool for someone on upwork or the like to do a gig ultra fast, leaving the client to deal with all the future pains. But since most projects end up not huge and successful, that might be just fine!

Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

#153

Post by meredydd »

methodover wrote: post #140
meredydd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd dispute that! There are much larger applications built on Anvil; it's just hard to build a two-week project for a demo video, and harder still to build a two-month one ;) We're starting to post some larger examples (check out our "download portal" example at https://anvil.works/learn#examples - I'm also working on a video series building a SaaS app over the course of a few hours). But the biggest apps are, of cou…

What's the largest, most complex application running on Anvil today?

That I can talk about publicly? Probably https://lightningai.com/.

Their control panel drives companies' entire online marketing operation - creative, targeting, performance, and more - across multiple advertising services. That's a whole lotta UI. Their back end drives the advertising platforms' APIs (eg Google and Facebook), and it all hooks into great big machine learning operations that run on big beefy servers out in EC2. Not just a pretty CRUD app, that's for sure.

(Unfortunately, they know what their services are worth, so I can't just point you at a live demo ;) )

Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

#154

Post by mephitix »

I love it. But seeing this now, in 2017, is a bit depressing to me.

For the last 15 years Microsoft has been putting out the same RAD tools, but based on ASP.NET/C#/Visual Studio. Things like drop-in provider-based OAuth, editing versioned database projects, WYSIWYG UI, etc. Publishing to the web, even the flow of clicking on a button to edit its handler looks like it was based directly on Winforms which is a 12 year old technology.

Why aren't there more of these things out there?

How much time now is spent learning the latest and greatest framework/toolkit/etc. only to spend more time configuring individual components and cobbling them together vs. just getting the product finished and published to users? I don't mean to be cynical but I wish there was some way all these different tools somehow built on each other instead of constantly resetting the dev stacks.

For example, Create React App - I'm constantly impressed by how it has eschewed configuration in favor of getting things done while still having a lot of flexibility. It draws on a lot of great, previous past projects and seems to define the train of thought for other react projects. It seems to me that people like Dan Abramov, Brent Jackson, and others are on the same wavelength which is incredibly powerful for the react community.

There should be a way for that sentiment to extend beyond React, into the database world, the IDE world so that we can collaborate and create more nice things like this.

Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

#155

Post by larrykwg »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #119
bobjordan wrote: post #58

So I've been working on a python flask web app in part time/spare time for my business for almost two years (in addition to running a company doing several million USD in sales over that time without the app.) In that two years, I've tracked my programming time with wakatime and I'm at >1000hrs now, more than 25 full-time 40hr work weeks of actual coding time. I'm running the app on a dedicated GPU server, as part of…

My personal experience with Flask has led me to believe it's many times easier to expand on vanilla Flask then it is to try and incorporate any of the flask-* libraries.

Flask never really seemed like a very mature framework to me, it got so many strange inconsistencies and very dubious design choices I much prefer newer, significantly simpler frameworks.

One example is the way the request context works in flask, I venture to say thats just terrible software design in my book (from flask import request, g). And seriously to have your framework give you a "global" variable to put random stuff in, wth?

Also I rather not use Flask-SQLAlchemy since why should my database models be tied so incredibly closely to some library of my web MICRO framework, it doesn't make sense, I mean its not django why introduce this coupling?

It seems if you need all the dependent libraries (like webassets and wtforms) just use django from the get go instead of going through the pain of trying to cleanly integrate dozens of flask libraries.

To see how a proper simple middleware-based framework should look like consider express, koa (nodejs), or bottle, falcon. Aiohttp and tornado also have their place of course.

Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

#156

Post by ghrifter »

meredydd wrote: post #10

Hi there! Founder here, slightly gobsmacked to see this top of HN. Do feel free to ask me any questions about the platform :) We also have a bunch of tutorial-cum-demo videos at: https://anvil.works/learn#tutorials

Do you have a list of like full fledged apps that users/companies have made?

Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

#157

Post by meredydd »

typon wrote: post #106
meredydd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really hard question to answer. We've got everyone from scrappy one-person startups building products on Anvil, to larger startups pumping terrifying quantities of money through Anvil apps, to Seriously Large Companies We Can't Name building internal tools with our on-premises version. Right now we're taking it all as it comes, but we never want to lose our focus on accessibility: It's way too hard to build…

Can you give examples of live sites running on Anvil?

I can't really talk about most of them, but I described one example down here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589020

Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

#158

Post by siva7891 »

sametmax wrote: post #85
meredydd wrote: post #10

Hi there! Founder here, slightly gobsmacked to see this top of HN. Do feel free to ask me any questions about the platform :) We also have a bunch of tutorial-cum-demo videos at: https://anvil.works/learn#tutorials

Hi, I'm really not a fan of Python client side. Or RAD. Or closed source services. And I'm hugely impressed by the potential of your product. Good luck. I never though I would say that one day. But don't listen to people asking you to open sourcing it now. You can always do it once you are profitable. But right now, you need money to get this going. And if your product does what you say it does, people will be happy…

I run a small software development company. I can understand your hesitation about not open sourcing the tool.

Don't do it until you are comfortable.

My only suggestion is if you are closing the product for any reason, then open source the core as much as possible.

Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

#159

Post by viraptor »

mephitix wrote: post #154

I love it. But seeing this now, in 2017, is a bit depressing to me. For the last 15 years Microsoft has been putting out the same RAD tools, but based on ASP.NET/C#/Visual Studio. Things like drop-in provider-based OAuth, editing versioned database projects, WYSIWYG UI, etc. Publishing to the web, even the flow of clicking on a button to edit its handler looks like it was based directly on Winforms which is a 12 year…

> Why aren't there more of these things out there?

There are a few - I did like the MS PowerApps recently. But these things work well in an enterprise environment where "works" is important, but "users don't want to kill themselves during interaction" is not. These tools are usually great at putting together a quick CRUD app that fits requirements. But they're typically not flexible enough to give you that finished and polished for users product. If you want to do that rather than a flow of basic forms and tables, you'll start fighting the framework at some point and then think "maybe I should've just used X from the start".

Maybe it doesn't have to be that way, but I did see this a lot.

Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python

#160

Post by mattstibbs »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #70

I am torn: 1. Great idea, just what "we" need in the language we need. (Python cloud RAD). 2. But I don't want to do all this work and be locked into your system forever. I want to be able to run this on Digital Ocean or AWS etc. if I want. I think am open source version where you give people an option of hosting on your site at first would be the best compromise. Please consider it.

I played with Anvil for the first time at PyConUK last weekend, and I was really impressed.

Specifically on the point of accessing your code:

- if you Architect your code well enough you can keep reasonable separation between generic Python code and code that is tightly-coupled to Anvil (I.e. keep it modular)

- and Anvil does actually provide a means for you to directly clone your Anvil app code locally from their servers using Git. This would give you a copy of all your code including front end templates etc.

I think tie-in is always a consideration but we are increasingly getting into that situation with things like AWS, and so we really must balance the pros and cons. I’d rather by tied in and profitable if I’m trying to get something off the ground...

Post reply on HN