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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

#121

Post by dmitriid »

warpech wrote: post #28
shakna wrote: post #10

> See it with your own eyes I'd love to. You need to show it on this page. Even if a screenshot (or screen capture, or some code) is pretty useless, it helps give the right context, and tells me this is actually a thing, and not just a hope. This [0] should be front and center. [0] https://alan-platform.com/pages/tuts/helloworld1.png

There is an animated gif in the tutorial: https://alan-platform.com/pages/tuts/getting-started.html

That gif is very confusing without context and doesn't show the actual working app (except one page for a split second)

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

#122

Post by klageveen »

childintime wrote: post #116

How does this compare to http://jasonette.com (besides the obvious platform differences)?

I don’t know jasonette in detail, but you should think of Alan primarily as a way of building and iterating on apps with lots of guarantees about data quality and matching specs, not necessarily a way to build an app quickly.

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

#123

Post by sctb »

fouc wrote: post #66
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…

Was the HN title fixed after your post? It's now "low-code" which I think is pretty understandable.

Yes, we updated the title to try to clarify.

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

#124

Post by klageveen »

maxsilver wrote: post #118
klageveen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback, this is exactly what we're looking for here. Perhaps some of this is "how to launch a platform 101", but we can't guess all the concerns everyone may have. Also, we're not necessarily looking to really kick start adoption for a wide audience right now. The platform lacks maturity on a number of levels to properly support that. We'll continue to work on our documentation and clarify some of th…

> We understand people want to see the UI, but it's not the key selling point. Pretty apps isn't what you'd use Alan for (although you could). In my humble opinion, I would suggest rethinking this. I imagine you don't intend to sound that way, but a response like this might suggest to people that you don't value user experience or good design, which would rule a lot of otherwise-interested people right out. For any s…

Fair points. Honestly I think our default UI looks pretty rad and it’s super important to us.

I think we need to do a Show HN at a later date to showcase it. There is so much to say about the platform, we wanted to focus it on the modeling language right now. I totally understand people want to know more about the UI though.

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

#125

Post by klageveen »

dmitriid wrote: post #120
klageveen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback, this is exactly what we're looking for here. Perhaps some of this is "how to launch a platform 101", but we can't guess all the concerns everyone may have. Also, we're not necessarily looking to really kick start adoption for a wide audience right now. The platform lacks maturity on a number of levels to properly support that. We'll continue to work on our documentation and clarify some of th…

> We understand people want to see the UI, but it's not the key selling point. Pretty apps isn't what you'd use Alan for And yet, > This makes it ideal for administrative tools and data gathering > Solutions built with Alan include everything from small accounting systems you can build in an afternoon, to large ERP solutions. I really pity the users of those systems then.

If prettiness isn’t a key selling point, doesn’t mean it’s not gorgeous. Sorry if it came across like it’s not a priority for us. But it’s not what sets it apart: all our competitors also have pretty apps, they don’t have our language.

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

#126

Post by ilaksh »

It's interesting to me that the positive HN response seems to show that programmers do (publicly) like CRUD generators and RAD (rapid application development) but only if there's no front-end.

I don't buy that it's actually better without a UI or that you can't make a UI for configuring complex models (it's hard but has been done many times before). But like I said, programmers seem to accept it more readily without the UI so maybe that's the trick to programmer popularity for these types of systems.

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

#127

Post by jf- »

Tutorial has some issues. “from_scratch.migration” should be “from_zero.migration”, and visiting server_ip:7584 gives an invalid address error. This is after downloading the virtual box image, installing Alan connect, doing the build steps, importing the built image and starting it.

Edit: Looks like the Alan connect app needs to be restarted after adding the image. Clicking “advanced” nothing was running, it’s fixed after reloading.

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

#129

Post by klageveen »

someguydave wrote: post #117

How do you deal with performance issues with this kind of abstraction?

Because we continuously reuse use a fairly limited number of patterns we get to optimize the hell out of them. At a generic level, not specific implementations, but you can still make them fast.

There are some other mitigating factors, like:

- the datastore is fully in memory

- you can spin up multiple datastores to share the load

You also don't tend to accidentally run into a performance issue. The constructions that cost more (e.g. nested derived collections) or are risky (kicking of derivations at a high interval) are known beforehand. You tend to know already if you're going to use a lot of memory or expect high CPU load.

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

#130

Post by klageveen »

tlrobinson wrote: post #128

It would be nice to have a simple example application code and demo. Something like TodoMVC seems like a reasonable place to start.

Out tutorial runs you through setting up something small, and example code lives on GitHub: https://github.com/M-industries/AlanProjectTemplate
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