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

Show HN: Alan – a low-code application platform

alan-platform.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 178 posts

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

#141

Post by klageveen »

yuchi wrote: post #137
klageveen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As dev AND ux designer I ask you to, please, not to forget that most of decision makers have been in a situation where they had to throw away a medium to big system whose UX was blatantly old and poorly executed because it was on top of something similar to Alan. (This is just 4GL again)

As a UX designer / dev I ensure you those concerns are front and center for us ;) The modeling language basically ensures applications are easy to understand, and we have lots of solutions to make them easy to use as well.

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

#142

Post by mprev »

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.

Low-code is a pretty standard industry term, though. Maybe not for the HN crowd but Gsuite has a low-code tool now and the likes of OutSystems have been doing it for years.

I’m more curious as to the name Alan.

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

#143

Post by TickleSteve »

sctb wrote: post #123
fouc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only the people who use the term "low code" seem to think its a term in widespread use.

No one else has heard of it.

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

#144

Post by jaredklewis »

klageveen wrote: post #89
ccleve wrote: post #86

I've long thought that this is the way applications should be built. 90% of what we do as app developers could be automated away. This looks really promising. That having been said, I'd like to echo some of the other comments here. You need better docs. As an app developer, I want to see some things right away: 1. What's the server written in? Can I see the code? It isn't clear which of your Github repos contain the…

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). We try to focus on the modeling language, as it's hopefully unique and cool enough to draw the right audience in.

I don't understand this. Whether you consider the UI to be a key selling point or not, it is still an indispensable part of the product. For me, the fact that I can't even see a screenshot of it is extremely off putting.

Imagine if Tesla didn't have any photos of the car in their marketing materials, just diagrams of the electric engine. "The key selling point is the electric engine, not the body." So what if it's not the key selling point? Even if a customer's priority is the engine, they are going to want to know about other aspects.

If the UI is a no-go for a potential user's use case, then what doesn't matter if the you totally ace the modeling language? Of course, lead with the modeling language if that is your unique selling point, but don't make people literally install software to see the UI.

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

#146

Post by rvanderarend »

ilaksh wrote: post #126

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…

Actually, in the early days we thought about whether to go text-based or not, for instance going for a boxes-and-lines type of modeling environment.

We concluded that for serious modeling, 80% or more of what one does is giving names to concepts, leading to the usage of a lot of text any way. And that boxes-and-lines introduces a lot of 'clutter' which is probably meaningful, but not in a strict enough way to do anything useful with it: x/y coordinates of boxes and lines.

That's next to there being a lot of tooling available when going text based (editors, versioning, etc), which is more of an added bonus in the short run.

In the end, we will probably evolve in the direction of using a projectional editor, making it possible to have some boxes-and-lines modeling environment as well.

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

#147

Post by rvanderarend »

randomThoughts9 wrote: post #114

The oldest project I know of that tried to do something similar was Naked Objects, which later became Apache Isis (the Java version at least). What's the difference between Alan Platform and Apache Isis?

We definitely have had experience with Naked Objects before this. I can tell you the main difference between Alan and Naked Objects is the modeling language under the hood. Which in Alan's case is a specific for its use, whereas in Naked Objects, it is something like Java or C#.

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

#148

Post by someguydave »

klageveen wrote: post #129
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 tha…

But you are releasing the server binaries for people to run on arbitrary hardware. Surely different CPUs and machine profiles move the performance thresholds on various dataflow implementations?

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

#149

Post by yuchi »

klageveen wrote: post #141
yuchi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As dev AND ux designer I ask you to, please, not to forget that most of decision makers have been in a situation where they had to throw away a medium to big system whose UX was blatantly old and poorly executed because it was on top of something similar to Alan. (This is just 4GL again)

As a UX designer / dev I ensure you those concerns are front and center for us ;) The modeling language basically ensures applications are easy to understand, and we have lots of solutions to make them easy to use as well.

If they are "front and center" they should be covered by your front page, probably also centered :P

Anyway I'm intrigued, but being it closed source means there's a huge "NO" for me written on top of it. Even if it's source code included (as in "we give code snapshots to customers") this means it is not the kind of project I would bet on.

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

#150

Post by wlesieutre »

klageveen wrote: post #124
maxsilver wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Even if you don't think that users will pick your product because great UI is the top priority, it's likely that avoiding bad UI is still high on the priority list. Passing that hurdle means showing the UI.
Post reply on HN