Mathworks Simulink. You can model your components, simulate fairly complex systems, auto-generate C implementations, and use a bunch of other fantastic tools (like Simulink Design Optimization to discover and tune critical parameters) that integrate into the workflow.
Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
151–160 of 290 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#152I'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…
I think most modern game engines have visual coding now. Unreal has Blueprints out of the box, and Unity has Playmaker as de-facto standard.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#153Testim.io, point and click e2e automation you can record and replay on your CI.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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://gis…
Right, those are the kind of permissions I had trouble with. That gist works for reads based on membership (even if a little unintuitive), but I couldn't figure out how do writes that validate using roles & permissions.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#155Hasura 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…
I'm a big user of graphile - they've also got a pretty good starter boilerplate with auth, etc baked in: https://github.com/graphile/starter
Have you tried it / do you have comparison points? I only poked around in Hasura a bit before deciding it wasn't worth the switching cost atm, but the out of the box upserts are compelling to me.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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've set up a working example with Firebase Authentication (which is admittedly 'something like Auth0') here: https://github.com/dvasdekis/react-admin-hasura-firebase/ Firebase does provide unlimited password logins for free, which mitigated my personal concerns about Auth0. The advantages of a SaaS auth provider compared to a roll-your-own have been documented elsewhere, and I personally found them compelling. What…
I really need a self hosted solution. Ideally it would have an LDAP adapter so it could get login info from our internal active directory. If I were building public facing apps Auth0 would be perfect.
I don't think I'd be allowed to entrust users passwords to an external entity, despite the fact that they would probably do a much better job than I would at securing them. Also despite the fact that we trust every other external provider to store passwords...
I've been looking into keycloak.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#157Being a part of the Dark beta ( https://darklang.com ) has been incredible. It makes setting up a simple backend with persistent storage a breeze.
Sure darklang improves productivity. But the cost of that productivity is absolute vendor lock-in... Darklang is a proprietary framework where the ENTIRE stack... even the IDE! is controlled by a specific company. Just be weary of this, when depending on it.
That's very true, but for me that's an acceptable tradeoff for not having to write much code or spin up a database, docker container, load balancer, or worry about security. Dark is great for getting a project off the ground and getting to the "proof of concept" stage: for me, there is tremendous value in getting there sooner rather than wasting a bunch of time doing things that are tangential to creating the product.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#158I've found that Azure's Logic App Service has been shockingly useful to me! The hard prerequisite is that you are within the Azure ecosystem, but using Logic Apps instead of defaulting to writing PowerShell for Function Apps significantly decreased development time, has increased the ease with which I can debug workflows, and when you're on the free tier (with both aforementioned flavors), then Logic Apps still reign…
We are in the middle of a year-long project to 'rewrite' all of our ESB glue/pipelines from MuleSoft to the Azure platform. We've been using Azure for a while now for almost all hosting. But our ESB had still been in Mule, because as sort of the vital arteries of our entire enterprise, it's hard to seriously consider completely reimplementing them -- especially since we're only about 3 years out from implementing Mul…
In regards to integrating Logic Apps with source control here is some reading material that I found useful on the topic:
- https://platform.deloitte.com.au/articles/preparing-azure-lo...
- https://www.feval.ca/posts/logicapp-ci/
- https://blog.thenetw.org/2019/08/20/logic-app-in-a-multi-ten...
- https://www.bruttin.com/2017/06/13/deploy-logic-app-with-arm...
It was a real hassle to get everything somewhat nicely through CI/CD (and it's still not at the level where I'd like it), but getting them in source control and having them deployed through an Azure DevOps' release pipeline has been immensely valuable.
Let me know if you have any more questions about that as I'm happy to help you get going!
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#159jhipster is good for basic crud apps.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#160Hasura 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 about Strapi https://strapi.io/? I see strapi has everything hasura has but with more user friendly UI. Am I missing something?