Ask HN: Easiest way to build a CRUD app?

If you want to do something that the ORM isn't designed to do it can be a real pain. But if you have 20-30-100 different business objects you need to model and only a few don't fit in nicely you save so much time in the others that you can absolutely afford to figure out the special cases.

If simplicity is your main requirement you might find inspiration in this:

> My focus has been on how to adapt the lessons I have learned working in teams at Google to a single programmer building small business work. There are many great engineering practices in Silicon Valley's big companies and well-capitalized VC firms, but one person does not have enough bandwidth to use them all and write software. The exercise for me is: what to keep and what must go.

> If I have been doing it right, the technology and techniques described here will sound easy. I have to fit it all in my head while having enough capacity left over to write software people want. Every extra thing has great cost, especially rarely touched software that comes back to bite in the middle of the night six months later.

https://crawshaw.io/blog/one-process-programming-notes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17701882

- bubble.io for commercial solution - appsmith.com or budibase.com for self-host open source solution

Both are fantastic solutions for CRUD apps

If you need something similar to a website or a store, the easiest option is to go with something like Wix (for websites) or Shopify for a store.

If you need something that's similar to a website but with a tad more complexity or with the potential to add more complexity, a good option might be a hosted WordPress site. You can start with something simple ad add a lot of comlexity via plugins or via writing your own code.

If you're looking for something fully custom, that's really not like anything else, then the easiest might be a low-code no-code tool. Haven't used many myself but that's often a good option.

Finally, if all of that fails, and assuming you need a web app (and not a desktop or mobile app), then you probably should use something like Django with Python or a similar framework for building an app, while keeping the HTML inline (as opposed to a separate React codebase or similar). Use whatever tools you know best to do this. IF you don't know anything, use whatever's the most similar to stuff you already know. (E.g. do you know Python? Use Django. Know Rails? Use Ruby).

This solution is still fairly easy, but also not exactly great for growth. My default these days is usually to start with a backend that's only there to provide an API, and a separate JS-based frontend. That's a lot more work, but most things end up there fairly quickly so usually worth just starting there.