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Show HN: Amplication – Instantly Generate Node.js Apps with GraphQL and REST API

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Re: Show HN: Amplication – Instantly Generate Node.js Apps with GraphQL and REST API

#91
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to agree. This is nothing against the OP but I never reach for boilerplate generators, even ones like `create-react-app`. Here's a great example of why: I do a bunch of research before I started my project ( https://listifi.app - for anyone curious) and decided to go with prisma.js. It looked like it was exactly what I wanted for a REST API built with koa. I've dumped probably a month fulltime on the pro…

Can you describe the problems you've encountered with Prisma? I'm in the process of choosing an ORM myself, and Prisma seems to be the best option of those I've tested.

I’m not a fan of ActiveRecord or ORMs in general. I’d much rather write raw sql queries with a little help to improve reusability.

I found Prisma to be super basic. Anything complex like joins or a composition of where’s and ors and it didn’t work.

It also nests related objects where for my purposes I wanted everything to be flat. So if a list has a user associated with it, I want to flatten it like: { list, user }.

I also didn’t like how Prisma has a generate cli to integrate end developer models that must be integrated into your build step to deploy if you’re using typescript.

Its schema cli command worked but in weird ways that I didn’t like. Sharing Prisma types with the client was not automatic. For example, Prisma coverts datetime columns into dates, which sounds nice, but when I send that data as an api response it turns into a string. Now I can’t use their interfaces without plucking the date times and converting it to a string. It just wasn’t as useful as I had hoped.

Knex does exactly what I want and nothing more. All of my raw sql queries were easily converted and worked perfectly. I build the interfaces and knex uses them. There’s no special command that converts their schema format into something I can kind of use.

Their typing was nice once I got it working however, and for simple things it worked fine. I just noticed I had to write a lot of raw sql.

A lot of people like it so don’t let me critique shy you away from using it. It probably works best if you are using graphql since it automatically nests the models which I would imagine works well with query resolvers.

Re: Show HN: Amplication – Instantly Generate Node.js Apps with GraphQL and REST API

#92

Hello, co-founder here: as a backend developer I've had to develop web APIs for various projects over the years. Before I could spend any time on designing and testing my business logic, I had to invest hours into making sure my boilerplate code was valid and provisioning infrastructure, not to mention setting up my cloud environment. We built Amplication so that developers like us could focus on coding the parts tha…

I literally started asking around on the web for exactly this today.

Seriously taking a look, this looks promising. We built an app on AppSync and Cognito and I want to get off AWS so I'm looking for alternatives, and this... fits the bill.

Re: Show HN: Amplication – Instantly Generate Node.js Apps with GraphQL and REST API

#94

Interesting idea but I looked at the sample app and the amount of code it generates looks excessive for the features it provides. Thinking about the effort to maintain and extend this code I am not sure if it would be a good starting point for MVP projects.

That's what I thought when I tried JHipster, setting up a Spring Backend with a Generic CRUD Controller and Generic Services, takes 1-2 hours and is much cleaner.

Re: Show HN: Amplication – Instantly Generate Node.js Apps with GraphQL and REST API

#95

What other projects are competitors in this space?

Not sure "competitor" is the right word, but I started to work on my own boilerplate/project-starter some time ago[0]. I choose to use NestJS, knex and NextJS. My objective is to achieve the best tradeoffs between autogenerated-boring-stuff and easily-customize-everything (yes, including complex DB queries, especially those actually).

Also, there's BlitzJS which seems to have similar objectives.

There's definitely no incumbent in the Js/ts/nodejs world similar to the django/laravel/rails/mojolicious frameworks in the other, more mature, dynamic languages.

https://github.com/tudorconstantin/knests

Re: Show HN: Amplication – Instantly Generate Node.js Apps with GraphQL and REST API

#96
post #92

Hello, co-founder here: as a backend developer I've had to develop web APIs for various projects over the years. Before I could spend any time on designing and testing my business logic, I had to invest hours into making sure my boilerplate code was valid and provisioning infrastructure, not to mention setting up my cloud environment. We built Amplication so that developers like us could focus on coding the parts tha…

I literally started asking around on the web for exactly this today. Seriously taking a look, this looks promising. We built an app on AppSync and Cognito and I want to get off AWS so I'm looking for alternatives, and this... fits the bill.

Glad to hear that! If You need support of any kind, join our discord channel and we will love to help

https://discord.gg/b8MrjU6

Re: Show HN: Amplication – Instantly Generate Node.js Apps with GraphQL and REST API

#98

Hello, co-founder here: as a backend developer I've had to develop web APIs for various projects over the years. Before I could spend any time on designing and testing my business logic, I had to invest hours into making sure my boilerplate code was valid and provisioning infrastructure, not to mention setting up my cloud environment. We built Amplication so that developers like us could focus on coding the parts tha…

@yuval : Congrats on launch. Happy to come across it. We need more people tackling this problem. UI looks cool :)

At XgeneCloud[1], we are after the same problem.

XgeneCloud provides a desktop app that can connect to any new/existing databases to instantly generate REST & GraphQL APIs.

(Supports MySQL, Postgres, SQL server & SQLite)

Happy to share notes on discord.

[1] : https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud

Re: Show HN: Amplication – Instantly Generate Node.js Apps with GraphQL and REST API

#99
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what you don't like about Prisma? I like Active Record + Arel (from Rails) a lot, and have found Knex relatively unpleasant in comparison, offhand Prisma has looked more pleasant/usable to me...

This is where our preferences probably differ. I’m not a fan of ActiveRecord or ORMs in general. I’d much rather write raw sql queries with a little help to improve reusability. I found Prisma to be super basic. Anything complex like joins or a composition of where’s and ors and it didn’t work. It also nests related objects where for my purposes I wanted everything to be flat. So if a list has a user associated with…

Curious about the date response part.

JSON.stringify(payload) turns dates into strings. Did that not work as a response for your API for some reason?

Re: Show HN: Amplication – Instantly Generate Node.js Apps with GraphQL and REST API

#100
post #76

I'm curious - is there a tool handles solely the "frontend codebase generation" part of this? This looks great, but we already have a well-defined backend and REST API built using Python+FastAPI, with SQLAlchemy as an ORM and Postgres backing it. I am not a good UI/UX designer, but I understand and have built React applications, so really find myself looking for something that can take an OpenAPI.json spec and produc…

React-admin[0]? Doesn't read openapi from what I could gather but solves similar problems in a best-practicey kind of way. [0] https://marmelab.com/react-admin/Readme.html

I had seen this a while ago but should take a fresh look at it - it seems like there should be a community tool that generates data providers from an openapi spec. Thanks!
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