Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

[sureklix]

Since low-coding is super trendy these days, I was wondering if there are actually useful apps not only for non-devs but also for lazy-devs?

I tried couple of no-code apps, but found them inflexible –not really giving you the opportunity to dive-in and customize.

[gavinray]

Hasura by far, lets you point-and-click build your database and table relationships with a web dashboard and autogenerates a full GraphQL CRUD API with permissions you can configure and JWT/webhook auth baked-in.

https://hasura.io/

I've been able to build in a weekend no-code what would've taken my team weeks or months to build by hand, even with something as productive as Rails. It automates the boring stuff and you just have to write single endpoints for custom business logic, like "send a welcome email on sign-up" or "process a payment".

It has a database viewer, but it's not the core of the product, so I use Forest Admin to autogenerate an Admin Dashboard that non-technical team members can use:

https://www.forestadmin.com/

With these two, you can point-and-click make 80% of a SaaS product in almost no time.

I wrote a tutorial on how to integrate Hasura + Forest Admin, for anyone interested:

http://hasura-forest-admin.surge.sh

For interacting with Hasura from a client, you can autogenerate fully-typed & documented query components in your framework of choice using GraphQL Code Generator:

https://graphql-code-generator.com/

Then I usually throw Metabase in there as a self-hosted Business Intelligence platform for non-technical people to use as well, and PostHog for analytics:

https://www.metabase.com/

https://posthog.com/

All of these all Docker Containers, so you can have them running locally or deployed in minutes.

This stack is absurdly powerful and productive.

[cpursley]

This is similar to what we're doing! Hasura + AutoCRUD framework + Metabase is a great stack for putting together a solid business application in no time.

Combine Hasura (automatic GraphQL on top of PostgreSQL) with React Admin (low code CRUD apps similar to Forest) and you can build an entire back office admin suite or form app (API endpoints and admin front end) in a matter of hours.

This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql

Here's a reference application I put together: https://github.com/cpursley/react-admin-low-code

And we're taking a step further and using Elixir to listen to Postgres table changes for an "Event" style architecture: https://medium.com/hackernoon/get-notified-of-user-signups-a...

[chimen]

I have this feeling that hasura is still "onboarding". I had this experience with Netlify that offered some amazing deals and waited for everyone to onboard then started hammering them hard. I got up to $150/mo really fast for a static site that receives only about 900req/day. Every single month they were limiting more features and shifting them on to some "premium" offering that was used to lock you in. I'm still waiting on Hasura to do the same. Forest admin is no different. I'm always tempted to try them out for new projects but I always find myself back to Django, it will be here 10 years down the road.

[dahdum]

I can't agree more about Hasura, I made the jump to GraphQL for my current application and it's been a dream. Their documentation is excellent, helping me get setup with auth0 jwt auth and apollo client despite being new to both.

Metabase was a game changer in my last company, it was so nice to just be able to drop a 50+ line custom SQL query in there with parameters and let users pull what they want. We'd also setup queries to be loaded via Google Sheets cron jobs. That enabled live dashboards most any spreadsheet user could create (pivot, lookups, transforms, etc.).

[mycall]

> Hasura Pro Pricing: Talk to Us

I'm always scared to call when I hear this.

[denster]

We've [1] been fans of Hasura for some time -- it's a terrific piece of work.

When we were looking to extend our spreadsheet functions that read/write to/from databases, we considered integrating Hasura as a backend.

Commendable work by the Hasura team, I think really worth checking out what they've done.

-

[1] Caveat: founder of MintData (https://mintdata.com) here, where we read/write from databases both directly via our flow editor and via spreadsheet functions which wrap things like Hasura.

[micimize]

I'm a big user of graphile - they've also got a pretty good starter boilerplate with auth, etc baked in: https://github.com/graphile/starter

Have you tried it / do you have comparison points? I only poked around in Hasura a bit before deciding it wasn't worth the switching cost atm, but the out of the box upserts are compelling to me.

[ravikapoor101]

What about Strapi https://strapi.io/? I see strapi has everything hasura has but with more user friendly UI. Am I missing something?

[golergka]

Awesome, never heard of it!

Graphile (https://www.graphile.org/) seems to be very similar, although I discovered it just a week ago (also on HN), and haven't had a chance to explore it yet.

[diericx]

What are you using to create a customer facing UI/frontend? It sounds like Hasura is just for backend

[jimbokun]

So hasura just exposes a Postgres database through GraphQL?

That sounds kinda nifty, but does it then allow you to write custom code to add business logic? Glancing through the documentation, that part wasn't clear to me.

[xupybd]

What are you using for your authentication adapter? I've been looking at picking up hasura but don't like the idea of using something like Auth0. So I've been hunting on the best tool for auth.

[pitchups]

Would be interested to know if you can do all this by using their open-source conmmunity edition, or would you need to use their paid / Pro version. Since the pricing for the paid version is not given, not sure but assuming it would be fairly expensive to use / deploy? My preference is for an open source tool so we are not locked in to a propreitary platform for the long term.

[kennydude]

Forest Admin looks really nice, but I wish you could host the admin UI yourself. Not a fantastic impression for clients if Forest (for whatever reason) suddenly stops offering it's service and your admin panel vanishes into thin air :(

[chris_st]

Are you hosting your own Postgres, or using a db-as-a-service? If so, which one?

[benhizak]

Cherre.com uses this stack. Hasura + postgres in particular. We love it.

[damidekronik]

The tutorial looks great. Thank you for a great work!

[antoaravinth]

Does hasura supports database replication? When I looked last time, it wasn't. Also I feel these tools are not enterprise ready, IMHO.

[bnchrch]

Hey Gavin, I’m really interested in this setup. Would you happen to have an example of this somewhere? Specifically the docket setup?

[bberkgaut]

Just tried to figure out why Hasura has lambda on it's logo, and hey, it's written in Haskell!

[dvdhsu]

Retool (https://retool.com) might be what you're looking for on the front-end. It's built for engineers, so it abstracts away a lot of the boiler-plate stuff (e.g. fetching data from an API, showing errors if it fails, showing a loading indicator on the button when the REST API is in progress, etc.). But you still write code for the custom bits (e.g. if you want to hide a component for certain users).

Here's a 3 minute demo video: https://cdn.tryretool.com/videos/4_minute_demo_4827ae.mp4

It's something we started working on a few years ago before low-code was a thing, haha. It's funny to see what you work on become a buzzword, haha. If any of you have any thoughts / feedback, please let me know! (HN, honestly, has been the main source of feedback for us as we've been working on it.)

[discordance]

Is Retool related to Airtable at all? - or do they just follow a similat style guide?

[quickthrower2]

Low code has always been a thing :-). They used to call it something like ... "Use a library".

Java is lo-code compared to say C++ which was the main option for enterprise software before Java came out. You had VBA in Excel for decades.

[carapace]

I'm gonna say Godot engine. Yeah, I'm seriously, the "game" engine. https://godotengine.org/

I was playing with it last month and whipped up a simple "toy" (calling it a "game" is too much) that lets me fly a little space ship around a little asteroid field. It took about a day to get it working enough to be fun. (I polished it up a little after that, and maybe one day I'll add some actual game play, mine an asteroid, whatever.)

https://git.sr.ht/~sforman/SpaceGame

While I used GDScript there's a node & pipe dataflow visual UI that non-programmers can use to construct "code", so I think it counts as low-code. You can modify your objects to "export" member vars to the UI so you can tweak them with widgets.

If I had to e.g. design and deploy a 3D world for VR users I would seriously consider Godot as a front-end IDE.

(BTW, I also made a fun knock-down-the-tower toy I call Yengapult: https://git.sr.ht/~sforman/Yengapult )

[ObsoleteNerd]

For 2D games (and some simple 3D) GameMaker Studio[0] is amazing too. It has a “Drag and Drop” mode which allows you to build entire games ready to publish. You can even switch to the code mode if you want to, as each piece of the drag and drop interface directly correlates to a chunk of code.

I’ve made a complete platformer game with my kid with the drag and drop mode in a weekend (5 levels, high score system, power ups, custom animations, the works) then exported it as a proper Windows installable game.

[0] https://www.yoyogames.com/

[phwitti]

Yeah i'd also go with unity as a 'low-code'-tool -- not just for the visual-scripting part, but also for the ability to easily add custom editor-tools for every workflow there is and therefore adding just more "low-code"-Tools to the game. We have about 100 custom tools in our studio -- often not more than a few lines of code, but our level-designers can script their own behaviors on top of that. I'm still waiting for an open source tool (not even focused on games) that incorporates code, data and ui this beautifully^^.

(Godot has the same basic principles but w/o the indefinite power of c# as modern and widely used programming language)

[golergka]

I think most modern game engines have visual coding now. Unreal has Blueprints out of the box, and Unity has Playmaker as de-facto standard.

[yboris]

Side note: a very simple 2D game building system with Lua:

https://love2d.org/ - LÖVE is an awesome framework for building 2d games (and it's cross platform!).

[usrme]

I've found that Azure's Logic App Service has been shockingly useful to me! The hard prerequisite is that you are within the Azure ecosystem, but using Logic Apps instead of defaulting to writing PowerShell for Function Apps significantly decreased development time, has increased the ease with which I can debug workflows, and when you're on the free tier (with both aforementioned flavors), then Logic Apps still reign supreme as they don't have any cold start issues that users of Function Apps (that don't get hammered all the time) do.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/logic-apps/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/understanding-serverl...

[ollerac]

I'm writing my own low code framework[0], so I'm really interested in this space. Over the past five weeks, I've been compiling a list of the most interesting software in this space.

Here's an early draft:

"The Low-Code Ecosystem" https://blog.remaketheweb.com/low-code-frameworks-for-buildi...

I think there's _a ton_ of amazing tools being developed in this area right now. I'm looking forward to seeing how things develop!

[0] Remake (https://remaketheweb.com/) — Build web apps with only HTML.

[paulgb]

Google Sheets can be surprisingly handy as a UI for editing data. For example, I have a job on AWS that scrapes a handful of URLs and snapshots them. Instead of creating a database and hosting it somewhere, or hard-coding them, I put them in a spreadsheet that the AWS job reads at the beginning of every run.

[artpar]

I have built a lot of internal apps on Daptin over the last 8-10 months. It's a headless CMS I started writing about 2 years ago.

https://github.com/daptin/daptin

My overall goal in Daptin (the name comes from adaptable) is to build something reliable which can run for years without needing any maintenance.

As for the features, I will try to list some here:

- YAML/JSON based data declaration

- CRUD API implementing https://jsonapi.org/

- GraphQL API

- Definable actions, for custom APIs

- Integration to any 3rd party API based on Swagger/OpenAPI spec

- Runs on mysql/postgres/sqlite

For more advance features:

- SMTP server, IMAP server

- Self generated certificates/ Acme TLS generation support

- Encrypted columns

- Asset columns (file/image/binary store)

- Asset columns backed by cloud storage (like ftp/disk/gdrive/s3/bb and many)

- Native OAuth/3rd party login support

- Exposing cloud store folders as static websites

[dboskovic]

This just launched the other day but I thought it was pretty up there: https://fibery.io

We use https://retool.com

Honorable mention to my own startup https://flatfile.io if you're trying to skip past the data import problem.

[wingerlang]

> https://fibery.io

I've clicked through all of their product overviews and I still don't have a clear understanding of what it is.

If it just launched -- have you actually used it enough to get value out of it? The whole point seems to be that it evolves (??) as a company grows but like I said I don't fully get it still.

[crabl]

Being a part of the Dark beta (https://darklang.com) has been incredible. It makes setting up a simple backend with persistent storage a breeze.

[dragonshed]

It's quite niche, but I've been really enjoying Pico8 [0], a 'fantasy console' retro game creation system. It's got quite a few limitations, but I've found it quite fun to explore game dev concepts without being tempted by perfection.

It's got simplified editors for tiles, sprites, maps, music, sound and code, runs on desktops + raspberry pis, and can export to web. The code you write is lua, with builtins for all the editable resources, and paves over most, if not all, the technical rabbit holes you can get yourself into with game development.

[0] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

[nikivi]

I love Keyboard Maestro for macOS. Made over 1,000 macros with it so far and automated pretty much all frictions I have with using my mac.

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/macos/macos-apps/keyboard-ma...

[evaneykelen]

For web development such as landing pages I like https://webflow.com. They've been able to create a nice UI that abstracts-away nested styling. It also provides decent animation features, form processing, and CDN asset delivery. Its biggest drawback is a lack of i18n without resorting to 3rd party iffy JS solutions.

[verdverm]

To the missing features...

Add syntax highlighting and GTM

Also real deployment previews and sharing between sites

Switched to Netlify, much happier

[iopeak]

Dialog-based development could be a compelling future. Projects like Storyscript (see demo here https://twitter.com/storyscripthq - it gets crazier) and Iris (for data science) are conversations with computers; changing the interface interaction to more "human" than anything else out there. Think Alexa, but for business QA, RPA and workflow/automation development. Image taking data from any source, asking complex questions over it (like Microsoft's Power BI) then creating repeatable processes with it.

Storyscript: https://storyscript.com (private beta) Iris: https://youtu.be/3VZZbKoXDVM (mostly research, OSS on GH) MS Power BI: https://powerbi.microsoft.com (enterprise)

[1123581321]

Have you tried Retool? More than many apps, its design is more clear than most about what it automates and what it doesn’t, so confusion is reduced. Low code needs to be less flexible somewhere or else it’s just a GUI re-implementation of programming languages.

[welanes]

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

For building websites, Webflow is powerful (and allows for fine-tuning).

Among utilities, Parabola (a kind of no-code extract, transform, load tool) is very neat.

For getting data/creating APIs without having to code I've built Simplescraper - https://simplescraper.io.

Currently working on an integration for Airtable that allows you to create a dynamic CMS using any data source, without code. Hopefully useful to non-dev and lazy-dev alike.

[e_carra]

I have to say that it is really impressive. The design is simple and beautiful. The overall product is a huge time-saver.

[makeee]

I'm building something for lazy React devs: https://divjoy.com

On the no-code side I really like http://carrd.co

[jhot]

I use Node-Red for all of my home automations. And Tasker for phone automation. I would consider both to fall in the low code genre but still allow a dev to do really cool things (both allow for you to write whatever you want in JS).

[tdy721]

Flash was really cool! I haven’t really seen anything that lives up to what I was able to accomplish way back in the day with Macromedia Flash.

Then again, that’s not really low code.

[juliend2]

I recently used Zapier to integrate with a few APIs and the ability to plug in your own code (https://zapier.com/help/create/code-webhooks/use-javascript-... ) was useful. And it was certainly less brain-demanding to deploy than something on a server I manage.

[im_down_w_otp]

Mathworks Simulink. You can model your components, simulate fairly complex systems, auto-generate C implementations, and use a bunch of other fantastic tools (like Simulink Design Optimization to discover and tune critical parameters) that integrate into the workflow.