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Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform

alan-platform.com

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Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform

#32

Post by okket »

codetrotter wrote: post #26
elviejo wrote: post #23

Some feedback: * "low code" is confusing When I started reading I thought low code, meant low "level" code, something like assembly or rust. After reading a lot in the page I saw it meant not writing imperative code. I think the term Model Driven Engineering would be more appropriate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-driven_engineering * How do I model business rules? How do I model a State machine? I want to spec…

> "low code" is confusing When I started reading I thought low code, meant low "level" code, something like assembly or rust. I expected that as well from the title but at the very start they link the meaning of the term so that those of us that don’t know what it means can quickly find out on Wikipedia. I think it’s best to do like they are doing and link the Wikipedia article.

It would also be helpful to use the spelling from Wikipedia: "low-code" vs. "low code" are very different in my mind.

Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform

#33

Post by klageveen »

elviejo wrote: post #23

Some feedback: * "low code" is confusing When I started reading I thought low code, meant low "level" code, something like assembly or rust. After reading a lot in the page I saw it meant not writing imperative code. I think the term Model Driven Engineering would be more appropriate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-driven_engineering * How do I model business rules? How do I model a State machine? I want to spec…

Thanks for the feedback and kudos!

Alan is definitely related to model driven engineering. It's a different take on what a model can specify, and models drive everything we do.

https://www.m-industries.com has some testimonials. We can't share those particular data models, but if you're really interested get on the forum and we can dig into some of those areas.

External systems can be interfaced with using our bridge application that can work with relational databases. We have tooling to rapidly build custom connectors using our interface specification language. One area that Alan shows it's still early days is that we don't have a shelf full of ready made connectors.

Our stack is all home grown. We run on a tiny custom built Linux distro. The graph database is also in house. There wasn't anything out there that fit our needs (like being 100% push/subscription based). Luckily Alan also helps keep our line count pretty low throughout the stack.

Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform

#34

Post by klageveen »

tyingq wrote: post #29

Any thoughts on pricing model yet? I see it's free for personal use. Who do you view as your competition?

We're still feeling out the market here, to see where we can take it. It will probably stay free for personal use and then grow from there with services like hosting, etc. Pricing model for businesses is something we're looking at from case to case currently.

Competitors include Mendix, Outsystems etc., when it comes to low-code and serving citizen developers. Excel as well. On the other hand there are still a lot of custom implementors out there that try to solve similar problems for businesses.

Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform

#35

Post by klageveen »

WorkLifeBalance wrote: post #24

How do you take this from here to the next step? Let's say I want to develop a multi user todo and I've followed the examples and now have some Users who log in entering a password. Someone points out that I shouldn't be storing passwords in plain text so I want to store them hashed. Despite there being hints in the documentation that this is possible (migrations shows the password hashed), it's not clear how to carr…

Well, in this particular case passwords are always hashed. So the platform deals with that for you. Other changes to the data model need a migration, which is covered here: https://alan-platform.com/pages/tuts/migration.html

Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform

#37

Post by copperx »

soneca wrote: post #20
have_faith wrote: post #17

Apologies for off-topic..., but can someone explain the logo to me? is it a head with legs??

I believe it is a head with a shirt collar. But at first glance, I thought it was a beer mug.

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.

Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform

#38

Post by grblovrflowerrr »

klageveen wrote: post #8
hguhghuff wrote: post #7

It should have a video showing the code the process and the sort of apps it builds. I’m not doing the tutorial. I’m sufficiently interested to give it a 30 second video. If that looks interesting I might look at more involved videos about some aspect.

Hey, that's good feedback thanks. We did a little video/gif of the deployment process ( https://alan-platform.com/pages/tuts/getting-started.html#bu... ). At some point we'll do a full walk through video, but time-wise it's expensive to do. The flow is pretty bare bones though, so if you're used to a text editor and command line tools it'll be pretty familiar.

I think a good example to follow for your project is the original Rails announcement video by DHH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY Maybe you can do a similar app in way less time!

Re: Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform

#39

Post by drostie »

Hey 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 reimplement it in TypeScript more recently, so that there is a non-Turing-complete subset of algebraic data types (though maybe I'll be able to add a fixpoint operator, who knows) as runtime objects with highly specific TypeScript types that are inferred from the functions you use to construct them. So then a parametric TypeScript construct,

    ValueOfType
embraces values that match the schema that you just specified. You can use this trick to write functions like

    myHTTPRouter.get('/objects/by-id/:objectguid', {
      params: {
        objectguid: {
          type: 'guid'
        }
      },
      async handler(params) {
        // inside of here, params has type {objectguid: string},
        // and VSCode knows this, because params is ValueOfType where
        // the schema is specified in the `params` key above.
        return response.json({success: true})
      }
    })
It's a really fun perspective on programming to have these schemas available at both runtime and compile-time, very DRY.
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