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Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

#91

Post by dragonwriter »

valtism wrote: post #89
paulgb wrote: post #23

Google Sheets can be surprisingly handy as a UI for editing data. For example, I have a job on AWS that scrapes a handful of URLs and snapshots them. Instead of creating a database and hosting it somewhere, or hard-coding them, I put them in a spreadsheet that the AWS job reads at the beginning of every run.

Aren't you forced to use Google Apps Script to interact with Sheets? I remember being forced to use it for interacting with Google Forms API.

> Aren't you forced to use Google Apps Script to interact with Sheets?

No, it has a REST API; you need Apps Script if you want automation within Sheets, but you can interact with Sheets without it.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

#92

Post by gavinray »

xupybd wrote: post #75
gavinray wrote: post #15

Hasura by far, lets you point-and-click build your database and table relationships with a web dashboard and autogenerates a full GraphQL CRUD API with permissions you can configure and JWT/webhook auth baked-in. https://hasura.io/ I've been able to build in a weekend no-code what would've taken my team weeks or months to build by hand, even with something as productive as Rails. It automates the boring stuff and you…

What are you using for your authentication adapter? I've been looking at picking up hasura but don't like the idea of using something like Auth0. So I've been hunting on the best tool for auth.

I have an example of JWT Auth using Bcrypt as Node.js functions in my starter kit, you can extrapolate from there:

https://github.com/GavinRay97/hasura-ultimate-starter/tree/m...

The sign-up Action bcrypt hashes the password and saves it by sending a mutation to Hasura, and the login Action queries for the user by their email and tries to bcrypt compare their password against the stored one and then return a spec-compliant token if they match.

It's fairly simple to implement your own Auth in Hasura, you just need to return a signed JWT that matches the spec:

https://hasura.io/docs/1.0/graphql/manual/auth/authenticatio...

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

#93

Post by gavinray »

mycall wrote: post #78
gavinray wrote: post #15

Hasura by far, lets you point-and-click build your database and table relationships with a web dashboard and autogenerates a full GraphQL CRUD API with permissions you can configure and JWT/webhook auth baked-in. https://hasura.io/ I've been able to build in a weekend no-code what would've taken my team weeks or months to build by hand, even with something as productive as Rails. It automates the boring stuff and you…

> Hasura Pro Pricing: Talk to Us I'm always scared to call when I hear this.

Tanmai, their CEO, gave a response in the Discord on this question a few weeks ago:

"The pricing depends on your team/org: what features you’re using Hasura and the uptime/response SLA that you need. If you have something running with Hasura already feel free to setup a chat with the team to get a sense of the pricing. However we will have something launching for self-serve style pricing soon for a managed HA / auto-scalable Hasura with Pro features."

I believe it's priced on a per-feature basis, so they're likely to work with you depending on what your particular needs are.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

#95

Post by simplify »

gavinray wrote: post #64
jimbokun wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So hasura just exposes a Postgres database through GraphQL? That sounds kinda nifty, but does it then allow you to write custom code to add business logic? Glancing through the documentation, that part wasn't clear to me.

That's one of the most common misconceptions about Hasura. While it CAN expose an existing Postgres database, where it really shines (in my opinion) is when you're starting a brand new product. Because you can create your whole database and all the relationships, foreign-keys, triggers, permissions, etc through the web console UI incredibly rapidly. And yeah, it takes care of all CRUD and provides an aggregation/stat…

I really want to like Hasura, but very quickly you'll run into limitations of its permission system. Especially when dealing with logic across relationships.

If only Hasura supported some king of Prolog / Datalog instead of their ad-hoc JSON language, then you'd be able to write nearly any possible use cases. Until then, I'll stick to building and maintaining my own backends... manually :(

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

#96

Post by gavinray »

denster wrote: post #79
gavinray wrote: post #15

Hasura by far, lets you point-and-click build your database and table relationships with a web dashboard and autogenerates a full GraphQL CRUD API with permissions you can configure and JWT/webhook auth baked-in. https://hasura.io/ I've been able to build in a weekend no-code what would've taken my team weeks or months to build by hand, even with something as productive as Rails. It automates the boring stuff and you…

We've [1] been fans of Hasura for some time -- it's a terrific piece of work. When we were looking to extend our spreadsheet functions that read/write to/from databases, we considered integrating Hasura as a backend. Commendable work by the Hasura team, I think really worth checking out what they've done. - [1] Caveat: founder of MintData ( https://mintdata.com ) here, where we read/write from databases both directly…

Are you guys Postgres-centric, out of curiosity? Really interesting product, sort of in the same ballpark of Spinoff and other Sheets-based low-code SaaS but an approach more unique than I've seen before.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

#97

Post by gavinray »

simplify wrote: post #95
gavinray wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the most common misconceptions about Hasura. While it CAN expose an existing Postgres database, where it really shines (in my opinion) is when you're starting a brand new product. Because you can create your whole database and all the relationships, foreign-keys, triggers, permissions, etc through the web console UI incredibly rapidly. And yeah, it takes care of all CRUD and provides an aggregation/stat…

I really want to like Hasura, but very quickly you'll run into limitations of its permission system. Especially when dealing with logic across relationships. If only Hasura supported some king of Prolog / Datalog instead of their ad-hoc JSON language, then you'd be able to write nearly any possible use cases. Until then, I'll stick to building and maintaining my own backends... manually :(

Might I ask what limitations/issues you ran into?

One of the biggest pain points I found was modeling Organization/Team/Multi-Tenant based permissions.

Generally, the advice is to use a session variable like X-Hasura-Organization-Id to filter in permissions, but recently through a Discord conversation a means to do this without a session variable was found out and I took some time to publish it as a Gist:

https://gist.github.com/GavinRay97/d7b8805078a47e00001e58eb8...

I would be interested in hearing what problems you had and seeing if there isn't some way around it, just for my own curiosity.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

#98

Post by sneak »

gavinray wrote: post #93
mycall wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hasura Pro Pricing: Talk to Us I'm always scared to call when I hear this.

Tanmai, their CEO, gave a response in the Discord on this question a few weeks ago: "The pricing depends on your team/org: what features you’re using Hasura and the uptime/response SLA that you need. If you have something running with Hasura already feel free to setup a chat with the team to get a sense of the pricing. However we will have something launching for self-serve style pricing soon for a managed HA / auto-…

That’s a double whammy. I and many others are prevented from creating a Discord account.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

#99

Post by ionwake »

simonw wrote: post #47

I'm going to take this opportunity to promote my current principal project, Datasette. https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ Datasette aims to reduce the gap between "I have some data" and "I have a useful JSON API for it" as much as possible. I think it does this really well. A timely example: the first version of this API for interacting with data about the COVID-19 pandemic took me just a few minutes to buil…

Looks good - is there any way to get world stats?

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

#100

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

carapace wrote: post #40

I'm gonna say Godot engine. Yeah, I'm seriously, the "game" engine. https://godotengine.org/ I was playing with it last month and whipped up a simple "toy" (calling it a "game" is too much) that lets me fly a little space ship around a little asteroid field. It took about a day to get it working enough to be fun. (I polished it up a little after that, and maybe one day I'll add some actual game play, mine an asteroid…

For 2D games (and some simple 3D) GameMaker Studio[0] is amazing too. It has a “Drag and Drop” mode which allows you to build entire games ready to publish. You can even switch to the code mode if you want to, as each piece of the drag and drop interface directly correlates to a chunk of code.

I’ve made a complete platformer game with my kid with the drag and drop mode in a weekend (5 levels, high score system, power ups, custom animations, the works) then exported it as a proper Windows installable game.

[0] https://www.yoyogames.com/

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