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Ask HN: I need a low-code back end for my app. What should I use?

15 points| mybestaccount | 5 years ago | reply

Needs:

The app is for a real estate company. They have a list of 100-200 homes for sale. I need a low-code solution that provides a user dashboard + api. The user dashboard is for the agent to go in and add quickly add listing + images. The api is for the mobile app to fetch the listings.

I've been looking at cms solutions like contentful.com but they seem geared towards blog publishing. The API is complex and cumbersome to use too.

16 comments

[+] etewiah|5 years ago|reply

Did you find a solution.

I created this open source project that could be useful for what you're trying to do:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

[+] andrefuchs|5 years ago|reply

You could easily use a Google Sheet for that. They provide an API and feed, embed options, and there are services like sheet2site.com (never used, not affiliated)

[+] robodale|5 years ago|reply

Downside to this is you fall under Google's terms of service. They could cut you off at any time and leave you without a backend. That being said, I've ran my little Google Chrome extension I've made last year using Sheets API without issue.

[+] AlchemistCamp|5 years ago|reply

Rails or Laravel. There's a massive ecosystem of libraries and the frameworks are designed to reduce the amount of code needed.

[+] aosaigh|5 years ago|reply

You could try Craft CMS. It has a UI layer for configuring your content and is much more flexible then the likes of Wordpress.

It’s got a nice publishing experience which makes it easy for clients and it has a GraphQL API built in so that you can send content to a mobile app. It’s not free but it’s a great CMS that isn’t focused solely on blog publishing.

[+] aciswhat|5 years ago|reply

https://www.sanity.io/ is another good CMS

[+] sbuccini|5 years ago|reply

I'd recommend checking out Firebase. The Firebase console might give you everything you need, or you could just build a really thin dashboard yourself on top of Firebase auth.

[+] tucaz|5 years ago|reply

If you like the idea behind contenful I’d encourage you to take a look at prismic.io as well. I found it much easier than contentful.

[+] lunatuna|5 years ago|reply

We’ve been using Outsystms with a lot of positive feedback from devs and users. Not sure how the licensing model would work in your situation.

[+] atsushin|5 years ago|reply

I'd give Airtable a try!

https://airtable.com/

[+] mybestaccount|5 years ago|reply

Airtable API apparently is throttled, the don't recommend using it as a backend.