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Power Fx: open-source now available

powerapps.microsoft.com

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Re: Power Fx: open-source now available

#61

Post by hermitcrab »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #19

PL question: Power FX follows the spreadsheet model where a change in one variable propagates and updates all variables that depend on it. I am curious why this model isn't more popular. Is it more computationally intensive?

Have you ever looked at a complex Excel spreadsheet written by someone else and tried to work out that the hell is going on?

It is really hard to work which sheets/rows/columns/cells are dependent of which other which sheets/rows/columns/cells. And that is before we even get to stuff like:

=FLOOR("5/"&DAY(MINUTE(YYYY/38)/2+56)&"/"&YYYY,7)-34

(and much worse)

Re: Power Fx: open-source now available

#62

Post by spaceisballer »

TuringTest wrote: post #33
spaceisballer wrote: post #18

It’s interesting reading the comments here as I assume everyone here has more coding experience than myself. We have all the Power Apps at my agency and I have yet to find a use case for them. They seem really interesting but until there are good use cases I don’t see this catching on for most users. I’m trying to find some way for this to fit into my work and my employees but even the Microsoft training that I’ve at…

The most relevant use case I can think for reactive programming is data transformation between formats. Say you have two departments that need to share data, but their data stores are structured in different ways. You can build an automated process that reads data from the first data pool and converts it into the format needed at the second pool, where the other department can use it. This is a quite common use case…

Ok that’s pretty interesting. Some of my employees and coworkers have been complaining about taking things from SharePoint lists and making them in a more “screen friendly” format and removing the manual work. We are pretty locked down into what software we use so maybe we could adapt this.

Re: Power Fx: open-source now available

#63

Post by zigzag312 »

qayxc wrote: post #55
sneeeeeed wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just run it in a VM, no random reboots to hold you hostage.

What are these "random reboots" people keep mentioning? My Windows boxes usually run about 12 to 14 days between (manual!) reboots, and those reboots are normally done to switch between operating systems. It's been literally years since Microsoft removed automatic reboots and even updates can be be postponed for several weeks and scheduled at the user's convenience. There are plenty of bad things about Windows, but t…

Windows update will under specific circumstances automatically reboot the system. Any unsaved work will be lost. This, to my knowledge, has not been fixed yet.

Re: Power Fx: open-source now available

#64

Post by foxbee »

ModernMech wrote: post #58
foxbee wrote: post #54

I am the cofounder of Budibase, and I agree with the many comments here around Microsoft throwing tools at the low-code space and seeing what sticks. The most popular source of users we get are PowerApps users who are fed up with the constant change and moving states. If you are looking for an open source alternative to Powerapps - check out Budibase [1][2] [1] https://github.com/Budibase/budibase [2] https://budibas…

Could you provide a comparison of Budibase vs. Power Apps? What are the pros and cons?

At the highest level: Budibase - open source + self-host via docker, K8s, DO Budibase - use handlebars and JavaScript for data binding Budibase - desktop, tablet, mobile apps Budibase - public and private apps Budibase - built in automation interface

Powerapps - very reliant on microsoft ecosystem (sharepoint, excel) Powerapps - uses Power fx Powerapps - mostly made for tablet and mobile apps Powerapps - private apps + portal Powerapps - i think powerapps makes use of another Microsoft tool for automation

I feel the components and outputted apps are better within Budibase. PowerApps is more mature than Budibase so it has an ecosystem of consultants

Re: Power Fx: open-source now available

#65

Post by ModernMech »

foxbee wrote: post #64
ModernMech wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you provide a comparison of Budibase vs. Power Apps? What are the pros and cons?

At the highest level: Budibase - open source + self-host via docker, K8s, DO Budibase - use handlebars and JavaScript for data binding Budibase - desktop, tablet, mobile apps Budibase - public and private apps Budibase - built in automation interface Powerapps - very reliant on microsoft ecosystem (sharepoint, excel) Powerapps - uses Power fx Powerapps - mostly made for tablet and mobile apps Powerapps - private apps…

Cool, thanks!

Re: Power Fx: open-source now available

#66

Post by sprash »

foxbee wrote: post #54

I am the cofounder of Budibase, and I agree with the many comments here around Microsoft throwing tools at the low-code space and seeing what sticks. The most popular source of users we get are PowerApps users who are fed up with the constant change and moving states. If you are looking for an open source alternative to Powerapps - check out Budibase [1][2] [1] https://github.com/Budibase/budibase [2] https://budibas…

This looks amazing. This app would make half of my current job more or less redundant.

Re: Power Fx: open-source now available

#67

Post by eggy »

I realize it's "low code", I code, but I cannot see how to play with it locally other than the console/REPL example towards the bottom. Will this be available in Excel? Access? Or do I need 'Dataverse'? I will try the console/REPL example.

I work at an engineering firm, and we are stuck with Excel forever. I've tried bringing in Pluto notebooks and Julia (compare with Matlab, etc.), SMath Studio (vs. MathCAD), RStudio, Python, WxMaxima, but to no avail. If Power FX is integrated with Excel and Access, I could see it being useful for us.

Re: Power Fx: open-source now available

#68

Post by qayxc »

zigzag312 wrote: post #63
qayxc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these "random reboots" people keep mentioning? My Windows boxes usually run about 12 to 14 days between (manual!) reboots, and those reboots are normally done to switch between operating systems. It's been literally years since Microsoft removed automatic reboots and even updates can be be postponed for several weeks and scheduled at the user's convenience. There are plenty of bad things about Windows, but t…

Windows update will under specific circumstances automatically reboot the system. Any unsaved work will be lost. This, to my knowledge, has not been fixed yet.

I'd be very interested in a source for that as I've not encountered this and haven't read about it in technical publications either.

Re: Power Fx: open-source now available

#69

Post by zigzag312 »

qayxc wrote: post #68
zigzag312 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows update will under specific circumstances automatically reboot the system. Any unsaved work will be lost. This, to my knowledge, has not been fixed yet.

I'd be very interested in a source for that as I've not encountered this and haven't read about it in technical publications either.

When there's an update that requires restart waiting to be installed, don't restart Windows for few weeks and leave computer idle outside active hours. Windows will install the update outside active hours and reboot automatically.

It happened to me before. I know of three occurrences of this happening to other people in this year alone.

Quick google search:

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/316460-how-to-stop-force...

https://superuser.com/questions/957267/how-to-disable-automa...

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/960453-windows-update...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/disabl...

https://techgenix.com/turn-off-windows-10-updates/

Re: Power Fx: open-source now available

#70

Post by dgudkov »

ModernMech wrote: post #60
dgudkov wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I suggest your non-tech users to try EasyMorph[1] (I'm the founder)? It's easier than PowerQuery (it's completely no-code) and at the same time more powerful. 80% of PowerQuery capabilities require coding. Our tool is 100% visual (and has a free edition). [1] https://easymorph.com

Respectfully, “easier” and “more powerful” are meaning-free descriptors. How is your product easier and more powerful? If you’re going to post an ad, at least do me the courtesy of telling me something I don’t know.

I agree, brief descriptions like sound vague and empty. So let me support my claims: EasyMorph is easier for non-technical people because unlike with PowerQuery all of its functionality is available without coding. Also, EasyMorph is more powerful than PowerQuery, because it has a bigger library of available data transformations, for instance, interval merge (a join where a key value must fall in a range specified by two fields), fuzzy matching, binning, de-aggregation (breaking down a total), or replacing substrings using a lookup table.

In terms of programming, EasyMorph is basically a high-level functional programming language (but entirely visual) with immutability, pipelining, automatic parallelization and concurrency. It allows arranging loops similar to FOR..NEXT, FOR..EACH, DO..WHILE/UNTIL loops in programming languages. It has subroutines, conditional IF/THEN/ELSE branching, exceptions, mutexes, and a built-in key-value storage.

Besides that, it combines data preparation with no-code automation because it has many so called external actions for exporting to/updating databases, sending low-level HTTP requests to web APIs, performing file operations (download, rename, delete, clone, zip, unzip, etc.), running external applications, and even executing SSH commands on remote machines. The full list of capabilities is rather extensive to list in one post and can be found here: https://easymorph.com/all-integrations.html.

Finally, EasyMorph is just faster due to its in-memory columnar engine with several tiers of data compression and aggressive optimizations that leverage CPU cache. We regularly see customers that switch from PowerQuery because EasyMorph is 1-2 orders of magnitude faster.

At the same time, EasyMorph is 5 times less expensive than Alteryx and has a very generous (as our users say) time-unlimited, data volume-unlimited free edition.

We're entirely bootstrapped, profitable, and almost double our revenue every year for the last several years.

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