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Show HN: Openkoda – Open–source, private, Salesforce alternative

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Re: Show HN: Openkoda – Open–source, private, Salesforce alternative

#52
post #30

Salesforce's biggest value proposition is the partner ecosystem, which Salesforce has cultivated for like 20+ years. Some platform companies (Shopify comes to mind) cannibalize their plugin ecosystem by adding similar functionality to the core platform, but Salesforce deliberately avoids competing with software/services in the partner ecosystem. It's such a safe bet to build on top of Salesforce, because there's basi…

I am not sure I'd agree with that - at one point Salesforce tried to buy my company, which was a best-of-the-AppExchange partner, and their justification for their (very) low offer was "that's what it would cost us to copy you". We sold the company 2 years later for 10x their offer, without a ton in the way of new revenue (our AppExchange ranking mysteriously tanked after we turned down their offer).

> AppExchange ranking mysteriously tanked after we turned down their offer

This alone would be worth a blog post (assuming you don't have any non disparagements with CRM)

Re: Show HN: Openkoda – Open–source, private, Salesforce alternative

#53
post #46

Looks cool, but honestly what companies need a Salesforce like too but can't afford Salesforce force ? I'm still have to host this thing somewhere, if I'm bootstraping a startup I might as well rely on Excel until I can afford Salesforce. I like the project though. Best of luck.

That's a great question and we have great answers from actual clients - the repeating pattern goes as follows: "We invested three years building this app, it's a booming success, but their user-based pricing is killing us" "We can't run complex queries" "It's too slow" "We feel our data is stuck there" "I want to own my code and my application" "Why do I need to use APEX where we use Java and JS everywhere else in th…

Okay so this isn't really for end users, it's not for Billy Bob's shop which needs to use Salesforce to track cupcake orders, but rather a vendor who would sell Salesforce like software to Billy Bob with some light customization on top.

Understood, thank you for your answer and I wish you the best of luck!

Re: Show HN: Openkoda – Open–source, private, Salesforce alternative

#54

In true enterprise fashion, they went with Java. Enterprise, confirmed.

Honest question, what's wrong with Java? It's performant, has mature libraries, good documentation, and supported pretty much everywhere.

There's nothing wrong with Java. It's old and boring, but most good tech is.

Re: Show HN: Openkoda – Open–source, private, Salesforce alternative

#55
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great question and we have great answers from actual clients - the repeating pattern goes as follows: "We invested three years building this app, it's a booming success, but their user-based pricing is killing us" "We can't run complex queries" "It's too slow" "We feel our data is stuck there" "I want to own my code and my application" "Why do I need to use APEX where we use Java and JS everywhere else in th…

Okay so this isn't really for end users, it's not for Billy Bob's shop which needs to use Salesforce to track cupcake orders, but rather a vendor who would sell Salesforce like software to Billy Bob with some light customization on top. Understood, thank you for your answer and I wish you the best of luck!

Honestly, I don't think there are many (revenue speaking) Billy Bob's shops using Salesforce to track their cupcake orders out there.

Re: Show HN: Openkoda – Open–source, private, Salesforce alternative

#56
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great question and we have great answers from actual clients - the repeating pattern goes as follows: "We invested three years building this app, it's a booming success, but their user-based pricing is killing us" "We can't run complex queries" "It's too slow" "We feel our data is stuck there" "I want to own my code and my application" "Why do I need to use APEX where we use Java and JS everywhere else in th…

Okay so this isn't really for end users, it's not for Billy Bob's shop which needs to use Salesforce to track cupcake orders, but rather a vendor who would sell Salesforce like software to Billy Bob with some light customization on top. Understood, thank you for your answer and I wish you the best of luck!

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Openkoda – Open–source, private, Salesforce alternative

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, what's wrong with Java? It's performant, has mature libraries, good documentation, and supported pretty much everywhere.

There's plenty I'd like to improve but it's honestly in a very good shape. There's a reason enterprise picks Java - it's battle tested and there are enough quality developers around. Frameworks like Spring for webdev are top notch. Unless you've got a very specific reason to pick something else (python or rust or whatever) Java is the safe bet (along with c# but Java is an order of magnitude bigger I think). It's jus…

It's not just a meme. The developer experience in Java is worse compared to some other popular programming languages like JavaScript, Go, Python, etc. The language is a bit verbose, and the compiling speed is slow, hence the development speed is slower. Java developers tend to overly abstract things, so the code tends to be unnecessarily complicated. The JVM also has a high memory footprint, the startup speed is slow, and it requires warming up the JIT. Some popular libraries and frameworks overuse reflection and annotation, they are nice to use but are nightmares to debug when issues happen. This is why GraalVM and Kotlin have been gaining popularity recently, as they aim to address several issues with the JVM and Java. The biggest strengths of Java are its ecosystem and community.

Re: Show HN: Openkoda – Open–source, private, Salesforce alternative

#58
post #52
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure I'd agree with that - at one point Salesforce tried to buy my company, which was a best-of-the-AppExchange partner, and their justification for their (very) low offer was "that's what it would cost us to copy you". We sold the company 2 years later for 10x their offer, without a ton in the way of new revenue (our AppExchange ranking mysteriously tanked after we turned down their offer).

> AppExchange ranking mysteriously tanked after we turned down their offer This alone would be worth a blog post (assuming you don't have any non disparagements with CRM)

This was over a decade ago, so happily not something I'm feeling too sharply nowadays. It all worked out better in the end.

Re: Show HN: Openkoda – Open–source, private, Salesforce alternative

#59

In true enterprise fashion, they went with Java. Enterprise, confirmed.

Honest question, what's wrong with Java? It's performant, has mature libraries, good documentation, and supported pretty much everywhere.

There is nothing inherently wrong with Java, people just love to joke about it. To some extent, justifiably so. Not necessarily because of the language, more because of the common patterns in established there
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