Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)

totaljs.com

61–70 of 83 posts

Re: Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)

#61

When I see low-code, I find myself looking for the Visual Basic of Web. If I could drag and drop a few pre-made controls (including a database control), double click to handle a few events, and have a CRUD app, I would be thrilled. Unfortunately, I still have not found that yet.

Hi - PM from Retool here. Have you tried our product? Should be super easy ~5 min to spin up a table + form CRUD application for your database tables. Plus, we can be deployed on-premise with SSO and source control.

https://retool.com/

Would love to hear what you think!

Re: Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)

#63
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did a ton of free components and apps, and we have been doing it for 10 years. - More than 10 apps - The number of UI components exceeds 300 - The number of flow components exceeds 100 - More than 60 components in UI Builder Internally, we have 9 people in full-time employment, they need salary. As a result, we would like to sell some premium components in order to earn money for the next development, but that's a…

It's very valid to sell premium blocks/packs. It's really amazing to have all the rest in the MIT version open-core. Thanks for that and don't be demoralized by some comments, we don't all think the same.

Licensing only part of your software under free software licenses is a clear statement that you do not believe in software freedoms for users.

A proprietary software house that releases some free software is still a proprietary software operation.

Re: Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)

#64
post #21

Node-RED is really tough for Bun to support because it relies on sloppy mode features like implicit global variable assignment (assigning a variable without var/let/const) and Bun currently treats every file as ESM (and transpiles CJS for compatibility)

For Bun on workflow builders, I'm currently working on making windmill [1] supports bun as an additional runtime to run the typescript scripts/steps. It's not the same as making the workflow engine run with bun (we use Rust) but I thought it might be worth mentioning :) [1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

Wow this looks incredible. Nice

Re: Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)

#65
post #63
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very valid to sell premium blocks/packs. It's really amazing to have all the rest in the MIT version open-core. Thanks for that and don't be demoralized by some comments, we don't all think the same.

Licensing only part of your software under free software licenses is a clear statement that you do not believe in software freedoms for users. A proprietary software house that releases some free software is still a proprietary software operation.

Somewhere else in this thread I asked for the list of licenses as I see most of these products keep the parts with the most work closed or under a license that many companies won’t touch (agpl or n2n license). It seems that almost everything is MIT; that is pretty refreshing for something like this. Check alternative solutions and you’ll find trivial parts open sourced and the hard parts proprietary or unusable in other software because of the license choice.

Kudos to the team of total.js. Who cares if they offer some paid stuff; because of the MIT license anyone can. If they don’t do it, someone else can and offer it all the same. As long as vital parts remain MIT, I cannot see how this is a proprietary software operation.

Tl;dr I agree with you, but I don’t see that being the case here

Re: Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)

#66
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- multithreading - better design collected from our Web components https://componentator.com - without third party dependencies (in the core) - online chat support with authors and contributors ( https://t.me/totaljs ) A lot of (open source) helpers like - UI Builder https://uibuilder.totaljs.com (released soon), - Total DB https://github.com/totaljs/totaldb (released soon), - OpenMail, OpenTemplates, OpenAuth, etc..

It'd be nice for HN to support bulleted lists, so we could go for readability without using blank lines.

Eh, you pay just a tiny bit of attention to your comment right after making it, you'll realize how to do it.

Re: Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)

#67

When I see low-code, I find myself looking for the Visual Basic of Web. If I could drag and drop a few pre-made controls (including a database control), double click to handle a few events, and have a CRUD app, I would be thrilled. Unfortunately, I still have not found that yet.

Hi - PM from Retool here. Have you tried our product? Should be super easy ~5 min to spin up a table + form CRUD application for your database tables. Plus, we can be deployed on-premise with SSO and source control. https://retool.com/ Would love to hear what you think!

The demo video including writing (or customizing) SQL + doesn't seem to have any sort of graph/node interface at all. How is it related to Total.js / Node-RED? Seems to be a completely different tool.

Re: Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)

#68

Total.js Flow is an excellent and modern Visual Programming Interface for low-code development. It's a viable alternative to Node-RED and fully open-source under the MIT license.

From your website >The main parts of the Total.js Platform are fully open-source That implies that parts aren't open source?

Except for Total.js API service, payments and Cloud, all parts are open-source under MIT. All of our projects are under the MIT license, but some projects are considered private.

Re: Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)

#69
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CSS is Bootstrap 3. > there's liberal use of "var" > The components implementation is very pythonic - it passes "self" around to decorate with functions Could you explain why these things are bad, other than "it's not the hip and trendy way to do things"?

Sure. Using Bootstrap 3 is a problem because it hasn't been supported for over three years and is no longer actively maintained [1]. This is a problem for many reasons, security and maintenance among them. The use of var has long been understood to be problematic due to footguns with scoping issues. It's the reason "let" was introduced into the language, and is pretty much exclusively used now. The pythonic approach…

> This is a problem for many reasons, security and maintenance among them

How exactly are those problems with Bootstrap 3? Security, in a CSS "framework"?

If it works, it works. You don't have to update everything to the latest version to get some sort of "easy to maintain" badge, things don't change quickly enough for that to make sense. Picking one version and sticking with it is a valid choice for "maintenance" as well as saying "we're gonna be on the latest version within N weeks of release".

Re: Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)

#70
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try OpenBlocks. I think is the most promising and fast developing low code tool. Better than appsmith, tooljet. https://openblocks.dev/

Is this related to Illa somehow? The UI builder looks very familiar.

Not related with Illa. Entire different software. I believe it would be the next big thing because of the rapid features they add in compare with other tools.
Post reply on HN