[HN Gopher] Show HN: Budibase - An open-source low code platform
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Show HN: Budibase - An open-source low code platform
Author : foxbee
Score : 160 points
Date : 2021-11-16 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (budibase.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (budibase.com)
| gervwyk wrote:
| Great work guys! Really high quality promotional video. Love it!
| mjashanks wrote:
| Thank you! Credit to https://www.thehypefactory.uk
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Hi folks! Budibase CTO and co-founder here.
|
| We can't wait for the community to use and get value from
| budibase - in both our cloud and self hosted offerings.
|
| Happy to answer any questions about our tech and our plans for
| the future!
| mike_chuckles wrote:
| Really glad to see you guys launching out of beta! I remember
| trying Budibase a while ago, one thing I notice you didn't
| mention was an Oracle database integration, is this something
| that might happen any time soon?
| shogunpurple wrote:
| We are currently in the process of shipping an oracle
| integration and it will be available in our release next week!
|
| Our oracle integration will also include automatic schema
| fetching and query generation, so we can completely automate
| CRUD operations against your existing oracle database.
| mike_chuckles wrote:
| That's great, will have to give it a try!
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| I attempted to use this a few months ago to prototype a unified
| ticketing solution (just an experiment to see if it would be
| worth adopting for small internal apps) using pre-existing mongo
| data. Seems super early to use this for anything serious in my
| view.
|
| TL;DR - It ended up being orders of magnitude faster for me to
| just build it from scratch.
|
| One of the biggest general UX issues I encountered was how data
| sources & queries are defined in the UI, and then how they're
| bound in the WSYWIG editor. It wasn't immediately obvious and the
| docs are pretty lean. In most cases, I'd just prefer a config
| file vs doing everything via the UI.
|
| I like the idea and how flexible it aims to be generally, but its
| in very early stages right now.
|
| (Small aside: There was also a showstopper mongo bug as well that
| would have prevented me from moving forward with the tool even if
| I liked it. It was a simple async issue, 11 line diff to fix, but
| took months to merge.)
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Hi, thanks for the feedback, sorry to hear you had some
| problems.
|
| The Mongo connector in general could probably do with some love
| - there's a few features in mongo such as projections that
| budibase does not support. We'd love to know more about what
| you were trying to build and how we could help you achieve it.
|
| We move quickly, however, and the platform has come a long way
| in even a few months. We hope you try the platform again soon
| and continue to provide feedback as to where it could be
| improved.
|
| Docs are a big focus for us over the coming months and they
| will see significant improvement in short order.
|
| Thanks again!
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| I'd be happy to help out on the mongo side if you'd like.
| Maybe some github issues with a related label to help triage
| those issues would be helpful for folks to lend a hand.
|
| I'll concede that no/low-code solutions have never
| historically worked out at my organization (context: I am
| cofounder and director of engineering at a wireless ISP).
| Theres always a set of tradeoffs that make it really hard to
| deliver value when you're dealing with business domain
| constraints that are hard to generalize.
|
| That said, I am always willing to give things a fair shot and
| have a long list of small use cases that I use for
| prototyping when I go down that rabbit hole.
| gervwyk wrote:
| Check out Lowdefy - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy
|
| It is open source, self hosted and you write your apps in
| config (yaml / json). So your are not trapped in a UI, you are
| free to copy paste find and replace and you can version control
| as you like. Also, we use it extensively with mongo.
|
| Shameless plug. Cofounder of Lowdefy
| Ace__ wrote:
| My use case may or may not have been part of the intended initial
| focus of Budibase, which was to create an MVP to test and refine
| an idea. I am not a dev, but I was able to find my around it for
| the most part. To me, it was like an updated, easier to use MS
| Access alternative. When I was stuck, I joined their Discord chat
| room. The founders were prompt and informative in response to my
| questions. Congratulations on the launch. To success. Ace.
| mjashanks wrote:
| Thanks Ace!
| vailripper wrote:
| I've been a big Retool user lately, this looks like a pretty nice
| competitor! I like that you've got some workflow components in
| here.
|
| How are the applications stored internally? Is it possible to do
| Git-based versioning with apps?
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Hi,
|
| Our app metadata is stored as JSON documents in CouchDB, but
| entire apps can be exported to .txt files that can be imported
| into budibase also. Our templates work through this method.
|
| We do not currently support git based versioning, although it's
| certainly something we could support in future, given the fact
| an entire app can be represented in a .txt file.
| gerdydog wrote:
| I have played around with this product a few times over the last
| few months! It's getting better with every release. I used it for
| an internal work tool last week and was able to be up and running
| in less than an hour, where normally I'd have spent a day at it.
| Using the blocks lets me forget about the design as well.
|
| Would recommend everyone have play with it!
| foxbee wrote:
| Appreciate the feedback. Blocks are a new feature, and we plan
| on adding many more
| revskill wrote:
| I don't see any demo here. Just one demo to show all strengths of
| the platform is still the fastest way to persuade user (like me),
| else i have many doubts and questions like, what it can do ? Can
| it do this ? How to do this things,...
| foxbee wrote:
| https://youtu.be/xoljVpty_Kw is a promo demo. You can also try
| our templates: https://budibase.com/templates. The setup
| process is fast.
| blakesterz wrote:
| I don't have much to say other than your landing page actually
| told me exactly what I could do with Budibase, which seems to not
| happen as often as I would expect. I always check out new stuff
| like this, and I'm often left wondering how this new thing works.
| Nice work explaining what you do! It's not something I'd likely
| need, but at least I know what it does.
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Thanks, really glad to hear that! If you do ever end up trying
| the platform, don't hesistate to reach out and ask questions on
| our github discussions forum.
| ramon wrote:
| This to me seems like the more feature full low-code open-source
| alternative available, congratulations!
| MarkOSullivan wrote:
| Got to say a big thanks to the team for what they've built so
| far, always enjoy using Budibase and find myself recommending
| plenty of other people to give it a try!
|
| Btw I love seeing the monthly updates Budibase showcase on your
| YouTube channel, keep them coming! Makes me excited seeing more
| and more features added each and every month on top of everything
| that is already there.
| foxbee wrote:
| Cheers for the support. The videos are a little basic and rough
| around the edges, but hopefully they get the point across.
| segphault wrote:
| Installing the budibase server from npm pulls in over a thousand
| transitive dependencies. The npm install command reports that
| there are 39 known vulnerabilities in budibase's dependencies,
| including 9 that are classed "high" and 3 that are "critical"
| severity.
|
| The dependency graph includes a lot of crap, like packages
| containing trivial single-line functions like "is-object" and
| "is-stream". That's a very large attack surface considering the
| poor security practices in the npm ecosystem[0] and the growing
| frequency of attacks on transitive dependencies[1].
|
| I'm interested in hearing from the creators what steps they take
| to audit their transitive dependencies in order to prevent this
| application from being compromised. Given that a tool like this
| would typically be given privileged access to internal data
| sources, it seems like a tempting target. I don't think I'd be
| comfortable using this in production.
|
| [0]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/52-percent-
| of... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28962168
| MisterSandman wrote:
| You're not wrong, but also, npm audit is pretty much a joke,
| and those "high" vulnerabilities aren't as bad as the terminal
| would want you to think. Should absolutely be fixed, but just
| relying on npm audit is a bit simplistic.
|
| Your critique about packages for is-object is valid, though.
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Hi,
|
| Thanks for the comment. We have just undergone a full security
| audit as of 2 weeks ago - any infrastructure or code
| vulnerabilities are currently being worked on.
|
| Many JavaScript projects contain huge dependency trees - it is
| unfortunately the nature of a 3rd party module-heavy ecosystem,
| and can be hard to tame the sheer size of the tree. We will
| update or pin dependencies as needed, to solve the security
| issues being reported by NPM.
|
| I should also mention that since budibase is self-hostable, it
| can be run inside all of your existing infrastructure and
| network - providing additional layers of security that you can
| control.
|
| Appreciate the feedback, and the information regarding
| transitive dependencies - interesting article.
|
| Note: Seems like source [0] has a broken link.
| [deleted]
| sharemywin wrote:
| I haven't played with the api connector, but where do you store
| the api keys? is there a way to throttle the calls and hide them
| behind authentication so a user doesn't just blast my api if it's
| a paid service?
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Hi,
|
| When using the REST connector, the API keys you hard code, as
| headers for example, are stored in CouchDB.
|
| We don't currently have rate limiting in the platform, but
| that's a great suggestion - especially if users can control the
| intervals.
| foxbee wrote:
| Hi HN! I'm one of the creators of Budibase, and today, we're
| excited to launch Budibase out of beta.
|
| Budibase is a low code platform for creating CRUD apps, and an
| open-source alternative to PowerApps, Mendix, and OutSystems.
|
| The Github repo is : https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
|
| And our website is: https://budibase.com
|
| Before Budibase, my cofounder and I worked together, and we were
| constantly tasked with creating CRUD apps for internal operations
| - the development process was repetitive, frustrating, and time-
| consuming. At the time, I looked at low-code options, but there
| was no standout open-source option.
|
| So, my cofounders and I have spent the last 3 years creating
| Budibase, an open-source low code platform, to make it faster,
| easier, and more enjoyable to build CRUD apps [forms, admin
| panels, approval apps, portals].
|
| We believe low-code platforms should seamlessly integrate with a
| company's tools and operations. With Budibase, you can create
| apps using: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Rest API, and more. Or you can
| start from scratch with Budibase's built-in database (built on
| Apache CouchDB). Right now, Budibase supports Open ID Connect and
| Google Auth. It also supports automations using Slack, email,
| Zapier, Integromat, Webhooks, JavaScipt, and you can run scripts,
| queries, CRON jobs.
|
| To design your apps, you basically add pre-built components
| [forms, tables, charts, buttons] to screens, then bind data to
| those components using Handlebars or JavaScript. Budibase apps
| work across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
|
| As you create more apps and automate more processes, the reliance
| on Budibase grows. So, we think it's important that you can 100%
| own your data and self-host Budibase on your own infrastructure
| (Docker, Digital Ocean, Kubernetes). Deploy Budibase with our
| pre-packaged Redis, MinIO, and CouchDB or connect to your own
| existing Amazon S3 compliant buckets, Redis clusters or CouchDB
| instances.
|
| Happy to answer any questions. We have a lot more to build and
| love to hear use cases and feedback.
|
| If you are interested, try it out:
|
| https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
|
| https://budibase.com
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| The landing page is devoid of images on Safari. Is the actual
| product similarly limited?
| foxbee wrote:
| What version of safari are you on?
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Version 14.1.2 (14611.3.10.1.7)
| foxbee wrote:
| Strange - Safari supports Webp in v14. Also, I've tested
| the website on two computers, both Safari v14 and they
| appear. Apologies for this and thanks for letting us know.
| I'll keep digging.
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Thanks for that! Seems like older versions of Safari don't
| support the webp format of images that we are using on the
| site.
|
| The actual product does not use this format, so it has full
| safari support and will work as expected.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| I've been looking for a no-code solution to quickly build webapps
| on top of APIs exposed for mobile apps. I've been documenting
| OpenAPI specs[0], and evaluated most Nocode solutions in the
| market, trying out the "Rest API" integration in all of them.
|
| Did the same for Budibase, and here's some feedback (on just the
| REST API integration):
|
| 1. Please link the (?) icon to the correct place in the docs. eg,
| if I'm on the REST screen, it makes more sense to send me to
| https://docs.budibase.com/quickstart-tutorials/crud-app-with...,
| instead of https://github.com/Budibase/budibase/discussions/
|
| 2. Provide html input placeholders in all fields. Understanding
| whether "Url" field refers to the base URL, or a complete
| endpoint URL (different platforms treat this differently) is
| confusing. Even things like whether or not it needs a trailing
| slash. Having a placeholder with a standard API (such as OpenAPI
| Pets example) makes it easier.
|
| 3. The Jinja template format is great (I don't think any other
| platform came close to what this simple solution does) - but it
| isn't documented well enough. The API endpoint creation form
| should guide me to it as a possibility - without me having to
| look for it.
|
| 4. Really liked the auto-schema detection.
|
| 5. The forms really need to be more explanatory. ("Parameters"
| could refer to HTTP body parameters, or REST API parameters, but
| it's unclear)
|
| 6. Rough edges such as [1] should either be fixed, or
| automatically be disallowed.
|
| As an aside, I'm curious why the entire nocode industry docs are
| on GitBooks.
|
| [0]: https://stoplight.captnemo.in/
|
| [1]:
| https://github.com/Budibase/budibase/discussions/1385#discus...
| foxbee wrote:
| This is great feedback. Thank you!
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Thanks so much for this detailed feedback.
|
| We are actually currently planning work to greatly improve the
| experience of the REST API integration (including better docs)
| - due to it being such a fundamental part of building any
| software.
|
| 1) Good catch, we will fix that right away. 2) Great
| suggestion, this will definitely help guide the user. 3) Very
| valid - there will be a more wizard based experience for the
| REST connector soon. It's quite manual at the moment.
| Appreciate that you liked the handlebars templating experience!
| 4) This is a big feature for budibase - we try and auto
| generate as much as we can, to make the dev experience faster.
| 5) More docs and guidance around this is on the way with our
| "blocks" feature, which should make building forms a much more
| pleasant experience. 6) as above.
|
| Gitbooks is a pretty nice platform - it takes a lot of the
| effort out of creating/designing docs and they recently updated
| their editor, so we are very happy with it!
| jimiljojo wrote:
| congrats! I work in a similar space, and this looks promising.
| Suggestion for your marketing team - the promo demo is great, but
| make it HD. The demo recording is pixelated on 4K res. You can do
| better :) Good luck!
| foxbee wrote:
| Cheers - where did you watch the promo video? We use wistia for
| the website, but you can view it on youtube too.
|
| Is this any better: https://youtu.be/xoljVpty_Kw
| jimiljojo wrote:
| that is the one I watched. See screenshot
| https://imgur.com/a/4NNv1vN
|
| The postgres fields are barely visible. I was also looking at
| the website templates for the score card. The screens get
| blurry there too. I might use the template ;)
| https://budibase.com/business-apps/templates/hashicorp-
| score...
| foxbee wrote:
| I will look into it. That's a good template to start with!
| snarkypixel wrote:
| Raw feedback: I think the product is promising and is cool, but
| the marketing/brand-image is cringey and turned me off
| completely.
| foxbee wrote:
| What did you feel was cringey?
| rpowell9k wrote:
| Looks great! I've used budibase before and it's looking really
| well these days, loving the UX improvements. Are there any plans
| for out of the box metrics or monitoring? e.g. with open source
| tools like prometheus
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Thanks - we have been working hard on making UX a priority for
| budibase and glad to see that it's paid off!
|
| We plan on introducing a self-hostable metrics stack built on
| exactly the technologies you mentioned in the next few months.
| Grafana, Loki, Prometheus and more.
|
| This should give users total insight into what's going on in
| their budibase installations and allow them control over their
| budibase infrastructure.
| rpowell9k wrote:
| that sounds great - thanks for the quick reply looking
| forward to it
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| congrats! following you for a while now and i think this could
| hit a sweet spot that is currently only occupied by retool.
| foxbee wrote:
| Thanks + it's open source which every dev tool should be!
| mjashanks wrote:
| Hey Everyone! Other Budibase co-founder here.
|
| An open-source platform is the missing piece to the low-code/no-
| code landscape - I'm also here to answer any questions!
| innomatics wrote:
| Is your landing page and hosting dashboard all built and powered
| by Budibase?
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Hi,
|
| Nope it isn't - our website is built with hugo
| https://gohugo.io/
|
| Our hosting dashboard is built with svelte.
| RonanMcQ wrote:
| I've been using Budibase for a while now to build different
| business apps. Really impressed with how easy it is to get
| deployable tools up and running (as someone who's not the best
| coder). Can't wait to see what else is in the pipeline!
| sharemywin wrote:
| I would like to see a hosted tier between Enterprise and Free.
|
| maybe something like $10/dev plus upcharges for storage and data
| transfer. but unlimited apps(or at least a generous amount of
| apps). and an issue escalation charge.
| mjashanks wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! We've not yet settled our pricing,
| which is why its not listed.
|
| Great to hear some opinions on it :)
| sharemywin wrote:
| just looking for a budget friendly option for small indie
| devs. lots of ideas but probably not a lot of traction.
| Multrex wrote:
| What's the difference between Budibase and AppSmith and what is
| the benefit to switch my apps from AppSmith to Budibase?
| [deleted]
| mjashanks wrote:
| TLDR; AppSmith and Budibase are quite different platforms, but
| with significant overlap.
|
| Budibase is meant to be used by IT Professionals (sysadmins,
| dbas, IT managers, PMs, developers). AppSmith is more targeted
| at developers. Because of this, Budibase has much less of a
| reliance on code - we like to say "code optional".
|
| Also, you will see us talk more about "Business apps", rather
| than "Internal Tools". A Budibase app is a real, single-page
| application - which you would happily give out to external
| users and folks in other departments who do not need to know
| your team's internal processes. The apps are also responsive by
| default.
|
| Another differentiator is that Budibase comes packaged with a
| database (runs on CouchDB). This makes creating new
| applications easy - without having to spin up another DB. We
| also offer 1st class support for SQL Databases - Budibase will
| automatically fetch your tables and automate the basic INSERT,
| UPDATE, SELECT and DELETE statements (like an ORM).
|
| If you want to place us in the overall low-code landscape, we
| are more like an open-source Powerapps/Mendix/OutSystems. I
| sometimes say (half-jokingly) that Budibase is what would
| happen if Retool and Stacker had an open-source baby.
| robjeiter wrote:
| hey there, here is Rob, co-founder at Chartmat. Congrats on
| your Launch. this looks amazing. Also super interesting
| thread on HN.
|
| At Chartmat we also provide internal apps, forms & dashboards
| (we are at an early stage though). however, we are targeting
| non-technical users (no-code niche), since we found it hard
| with our previous low-code iteration to get enough users.
|
| I wish you guys all the best on your way & I'm always happy
| to exchange experiences. Keep the good work up!
| arey_abhishek wrote:
| Appsmith founder here. Congratulations on launching Budibase! I
| think it's a beautiful product.
|
| Like MJshanks mentioned, there's some overlap in the usecases
| but there are significant differences in the platform
| direction. Budibase is more no-code, while Appsmith is geared
| towards developers aiming to build complex applications.
|
| Appsmith is a more popular and mature tool with high quality
| documentation, video tutorials and stellar community support.
| The GitHub stars, issue list, and size of Discord community
| reflect this. [0]
|
| 1. According to users who've tried both, Appsmith's UX is
| simpler and enables building information dense UI. Appsmith has
| drag and drop to build absolute UI vs. relative positioning in
| Budibase. This does make Budibase apps more mobile responsive
| than Appsmith ones. Links to comments by other HN users [1] [2]
|
| 2. Appsmith is a more powerful platform with a high ceiling and
| low floor for entry. You can build simple apps quickly by auto-
| generating them. In Appsmith, you can write full-fledged
| JavaScript anywhere on the platform. This ensures all your
| business logic is always expressed correctly. You can map over
| data, merge data from different data sources, trigger
| conditional workflows, and conditionally control widget
| properties all with a few snippets of code.
|
| Few more feature differences:
|
| 1. Appsmith has more UI components and support for 100+ charts
|
| 2. Built in git sync for version control
|
| 3. Real-time commenting and real-time editing(WIP) to enable
| collaboration between users
|
| 4. Appsmith has organizations/workspaces to help freelancers
| manage multiple projects
|
| 5. Error logger and linter to debug issues
|
| Honestly at a more fundamental level, it's just great to see
| all the different products that have come out over the years
| that are trying to tackle the same problem space. When we
| started out initially, we didn't find any open-source
| alternatives (Budibase wasn't open source then), and so we
| embarked on building it. And now it's great to see so many
| different products, which gives users more choice and power
| over finding the platform that fits their needs best.
|
| [0] https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28991242
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304152
| f6v wrote:
| But what if I want to see the pricing right away?
| mjashanks wrote:
| We haven't yet worked out out our pricing model for Budibase
| Cloud. However, it will most likely be user-based / per seat -
| similar to platforms like Retool & Airtable.
| oezi wrote:
| Such pricing models would prevent any kind of resale for most
| products. Please at least consider a pricing model which
| allows for something like 1 USD per MAU, for instance if data
| isn't shared between users (could a SaaS be build on budibase
| which cost 10 USD per month to the end-user).
| mjashanks wrote:
| I hear you! Budibase is not meant for building a SaaS
| product. However, it's good for "Customer Portals" -
| whereby you are giving access to external users. This is a
| problem for per-seat pricing, but there are ways to solve
| it.
|
| We've thought about pricing per MAU. The difficulty is that
| we would always be charging for last month's usage, rather
| than more predictable upfront charging. Also - coming up
| with an exact definition of "active" is not trivial!
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| swyx wrote:
| just chiming in to congratulate you on a successful Product Hunt
| launch today as well!
| (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/budibase)
|
| i gotta ask about the tradeoffs of being open source. It's great
| for trust and marketing, but if people can self-host Budibase
| they're always weighing DIY vs paying you. I also work in an open
| source company and I know product development is often slowed
| because you have to consider the open ended needs of the open
| source users vs the constrained assumptions of your cloud.
|
| Any insights or rules of thumb you've developed to think about
| running an open source business?
| mjashanks wrote:
| Thanks! Open-source has been fantastic for us. We've only
| recently launched our cloud platform, yet we've had a good
| sized community using Budibase and feeding back issues, feature
| requests etc. for ages. Building an open-source product has
| been so rewarding that way.
|
| Of course, you're exactly right - we now have another ball to
| juggle; keeping our cloud up and running!
|
| It took us nearly 3 years to open our cloud up, but I'm so glad
| that we left it this long. Only now do we have the engineering
| resource to handle open-source/self-host and cloud whilst still
| keeping the pace of development up.
|
| So, for tips - work on product, product, product. Build your
| community and give them a great open-source offering. Your
| community will give back in return - even pure product feedback
| is gold. Then launch cloud when your direction is solid and
| you're confident in your product.
| peterkelly wrote:
| I notice you've used two different programming languages to
| express application logic. A the high-level, you have
| automations, which are simple but look very limited in terms of
| capabilities (i haven't studied this part in great detail, but
| does its support things like looping, arbitrary conditional
| expressions, and an abstraction mechanism like user-defined
| functions?). At the low level, you have JavaScript to do fine-
| grained data manipulation, which is often necessary to take care
| of details like computing summaries of data or transforming
| between different formats.
|
| I've seen this approach used in a _lot_ of different workflow
| systems over the years, and it 's always struck be as awkward.
| Have you considered designing the automation language in such a
| way that it is sufficiently expressive to cover the full range of
| needs for apps, from the high-level aspects to the low-level
| details?
|
| The approach I prefer to use is to pick a suitably generic
| language (generally based on a formal process calculus and
| extended with useful primitives). I'm on my second round of doing
| this now (first as an academic research project, now in industry)
| and in both cases it's been based on lambda calculus (and in the
| industry project, based on Scheme). The language constructs and
| model of computation are identical whether you're implementing
| high-level aspects of the workflow logic (a sequence of steps,
| with optional conditional branches, looping etc) and low-level
| aspects (iterating through a list of numbers to compute the sum).
| One language + interpreter takes care of both. I discuss this
| approach in Chapters 2 and 3 of
| https://www.pmkelly.net/publications/thesis.pdf.
| gervwyk wrote:
| I've read your abstract and it looks very interesting! I'll be
| diving into the rest as I find time over the next few weeks
| thanks for sharing! And well done on this piece of work!
|
| It was interesting to me that you mentioned "functional
| programming as a model for data-oriented workflow languages". I
| find it interesting because we are building Lowdefy [0] with
| which you can express feature rich apps in yaml / json, and
| have been considering how to implement DAG type stuff in future
| versions.
|
| We've taken a lot of inspiration from Mongodb aggression query
| language and as a result built a json / yaml parser which
| evaluates functions (operators) to implement logic throughout
| the app. This proved to be extremely flexible, easy to use for
| data manipulation, and surprisingly performant as we can
| actually evaluate the expressions during the render loop.
|
| Going to read more parts of your thesis.
|
| [0] - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Hi Peter,
|
| Automations are simple by design - the general automation steps
| are kept simple so they are easy to configure and create. We do
| however have a JS and a bash automation block. These blocks let
| you perform looping, iteration and logic using either
| JavaScript or bash.
|
| The reason we use JavaScript is simple. Most software engineers
| can write or at least express simple constructs in JavaScript.
| Being a C family language, this makes it easy to pick up for
| engineers who have been exposed to other languages like Java,
| for example.
|
| The problems you are describing are actually something that we
| have felt before, when budibase did not have JS support, we had
| users reporting that the templating/handlebars syntax was not
| good for logic, and was new to them. It was esoteric and
| required in depth knowledge for advanced use cases.
|
| Using an off-the-shelf high level or more specific expressive
| language has some serious drawbacks, especially if you create
| it yourself. The first is education - writing extensive docs
| around how to write and use that language. The next is
| maintenance - maintaining your own custom PEG grammar or
| programming language is a huge project in itself, not even
| including the research required to execute it well.
|
| By using JavaScript, we can leverage the already existing
| plumbing for executing JavaScript, and provide something that
| has much for familiarity to the general user.
| miki_tyler wrote:
| I see that you support some integrations. We are interested on
| that (http://stack55.com), do you provide or plan to build some
| custom API?
| shogunpurple wrote:
| Hi,
|
| We currently do not have a documented direct REST API - but you
| can use our webhook feature to ping budibase and trigger
| actions within the platform.
|
| We do plan to provide a custom API and a fully documented,
| official HTTP API in the next few months.
| fuddle wrote:
| Looks awesome! It's great to see more open source companies doing
| well.
| foxbee wrote:
| Thank you for your kind words
| tomnipotent wrote:
| I really appreciate how forward your product is with pushing the
| open source version. After clicking around for a bit in Cloud, it
| made is so easy to commit to a local install.
|
| Budibase is definitely a product I could see preferring to spend
| on Enterprise, unless there was a very compelling my team could
| accomplish "more" with self-hosting. I just ask that if you end
| up with some sort of per-user/seat fee, that you follow Slack's
| lead and charge only for activity. This will win my heart over.
|
| Also, custom domain support. Execs love their vanity URLs.
| mjashanks wrote:
| Thank you! I hear you with the pricing for activity. It's
| definitely something that we will consider.
|
| And who doesn't love a vanity URL?!
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