"Retool for Enterprise" I assume you have no ties to Retool but using it to explain your product ? Sounded like it is a product offered by Retool so you might want to rethink that.
Sorry, that's partly my fault - I've replaced "open-source Retool for enterprise" with a more generic phrase now. Is it better?
Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
51–60 of 94 posts
Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
#52When I go to the win95 admin portal demo my entire monitor starts to flicker (almost with the refresh rate). Is this just brain playing tricks? https://win95.refine.dev/
Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
#53Congratulations and welcome to the open source low code club: Budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase Appsmith https://github.com/appsmithorg Tooljet https://github.com/ToolJet
Here's what sets Refine apart: we're all about getting hands-on with the code, rather than relying solely on drag-and-drop like some other tools do, such as Retool, Appsmith, Tooljet, Budibase, and others. Instead of just giving you a set of pre-made building blocks, Refine goes the extra mile and creates a complete React project for you. This project comes packed with useful hooks and providers that make your work s…
To us, low-code is really about creating simpler, or higher up the logical stack, abstractions, and then generating the implementation.
Our take is not so far off from yours, where we take a code first approach. Users declaratively define their application in CUE and then get most of the code. Rather than providing hooks, we let the user write directly in the output code. Unlike Refine, we enable our tool to continue to aid the developer beyond the initial scaffold phase, allowing things like the data model to update and the user gets new database migrations to be auto-generated and applied. We also make it really easy for anyone to create and share these application blueprints or generators (as we call them).
In this way, the user can select any mix of technology and make starterkits or addons for any application, not just webapps. For example we have users (ops team) injecting and maintaining CI & k8s files into their service fleets (dev team). This is a case where we see low-code, as a term, more generally.
Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
ha-ha, brother, I feel you. Infra engineer (VP last position) and built an app with Refine. I was exactly in your position not a long time ago. I tried to choose "The Best Framework Ever" and made a lot of mistakes, and at the end, if you don't know frontend go with the flow: React + Next.js. Not because they are Best Ever, but because the majority of content online is dedicated to these frameworks. StackOverflow, Ch…
The deceptive part of these types of frameworks is this: on the first day, you think it will solve all your problems. On the second day, you're happy, thinking about how much you've sped up because you chose this framework for your project. On the third day, you have a custom need, and you research how to do it within that framework. On the fourth day, you hack the framework to make it flexible. On the fifth day, you…
Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
#55Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
ha-ha, brother, I feel you. Infra engineer (VP last position) and built an app with Refine. I was exactly in your position not a long time ago. I tried to choose "The Best Framework Ever" and made a lot of mistakes, and at the end, if you don't know frontend go with the flow: React + Next.js. Not because they are Best Ever, but because the majority of content online is dedicated to these frameworks. StackOverflow, Ch…
I tried to use the site you mentioned at the end of your post, but when I tried to add an ec2 instance (searching for ec2 resource) I got a 500 error "Error talking to backend server: 500".
Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
#57Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
ha-ha, brother, I feel you. Infra engineer (VP last position) and built an app with Refine. I was exactly in your position not a long time ago. I tried to choose "The Best Framework Ever" and made a lot of mistakes, and at the end, if you don't know frontend go with the flow: React + Next.js. Not because they are Best Ever, but because the majority of content online is dedicated to these frameworks. StackOverflow, Ch…
The deceptive part of these types of frameworks is this: on the first day, you think it will solve all your problems. On the second day, you're happy, thinking about how much you've sped up because you chose this framework for your project. On the third day, you have a custom need, and you research how to do it within that framework. On the fourth day, you hack the framework to make it flexible. On the fifth day, you…
Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cranking out an admin dashboard in react then also means supporting an admin dashboard. The dev is now on the hook for user issues, additional feature requests, hey can you just add this other field, etc… The dev is interrupted and distracted from other work while the other internal team is slowed down and blocked waiting for the dev to clear their tickets. If you have semi-technical users (can muddle through generat…
My first point, which I elaborated on in another reply to my comment, is that this makes sense for tools that are completely no-code. Refine brags about being developer first. Their example on github is a 75 line React-ish script. So, someone is writing, testing, deploying code. If that isn't your dev team, then who is managing that process and supporting it when someone inevitably borks it? My second point is that e…
Refine does appear to require developer build-out and is more of quickstart framework.
Re: Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The deceptive part of these types of frameworks is this: on the first day, you think it will solve all your problems. On the second day, you're happy, thinking about how much you've sped up because you chose this framework for your project. On the third day, you have a custom need, and you research how to do it within that framework. On the fourth day, you hack the framework to make it flexible. On the fifth day, you…
And on the sixth day you have uncontrollable flashbacks to the days of using jquery to manage your application state as a singleton in the global scope and you die a bit inside ;).