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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

It looks nice at first glance. Eventually someone, somewhere, is going to get this right and it will be extremely popular. Maybe it's you, who knows.

I bet there are hundreds of millions of dollars spent every year on full on huge projects that are essentially a simple CRUD application.

Do you support writing event based code in some way?

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We're working on integration with Zapier at the moment, it should be ready for the next major release. Do you have any suggestions for other event-based systems? Zapier is the only one I'm familiar with.

https://ifttt.com/

I was just thinking of the ability to have javascript responding to and interacting with the form. Calling out to external services as well would be huge as well. But if you can do the first, basically a properly functioning "MS Access for the web", you would make an absolute killing.

I think current developers (and managers) either are too young to know of Access/Delphi/PowerBuilder and how easy it was to build extremely useful applications in them, or perhaps more likely their livelihood depends on them not remembering it. Sure there are shortcomings, but for most in-house apps built today, nothing that would be a show stopper. If you could bring that rapid development to web apps....wow.

I recommend adding something similar to aws lambda or similar features as firebase - in this way you can be most of the UI and some simple scripts to add domain specific logic when needed. In theory some of the logic could be UI driven like when this field has this value perform this action...

Event based code, or even webservice callouts would be a killer feature. It was the first thing I started looking for on the page. With just a few more features this could easily capture a portion of the SMB market who's interested in something as flexible as Salesforce, but can't swallow the $85+ monthly cost per user.

The leader in this space at the moment is Intuit, with their Quickbase product. You can get a rough idea of the customer base here: http://quickbase.intuit.com/customers

They claim 1/2 of the Fortune 100 are customers.

Disclaimer: I work for a sister-company.

"We" have something like this with event based "model actions" which also support calling out to webservices (both rest and soap).

Shameless "competitor plug"; will remove if considered inappropriate: http://www.bettyblocks.com/en

edit: App/marketing is being translated as we speak; you guys will be able to figure things out right? ;-)

Am very interested in something like this. I'm a can code, won't code type of person. I need something that can auto trigger things such as emails etc after certain events. I'm finding crm systems to restrictive or too bloated and other database software is either too tech focused or too limited in scope. Will this help me? I looked around your site but kept getting 404 errors

Just heard you got in touch with one of our sales guys. He'll walk you through getting started.

@all: thanks for the feedback! Your comments are heard and are high up on the list of "stuff to get right REAL fast".

For anyone with questions: shoot me an email, I'll be happy to answer questions! Mail is in the bio.

> edit: App/marketing is being translated as we speak; you guys will be able to figure things out right? ;-)

I couldn't find a good demo on your site. Got a direct link?

Please shoot me an email and I'll walk you through it/get you all set up!

Don't worry about it, it's not inappropriate at all. Good luck with your product!

Looks interesting but hard to tell much about it based on the current website.

If you want a clear intro while we're working on the site please drop me an email. I'm happy to clarify things!

Totally agree. I can't wait for someone to get this right! Many, many enterprise shops spend way too much time building simple CRUD apps. It's basically a "Microsoft Access/VBA" or "FileMaker" for the web.

Can't Access be used for web applications?

As far as I'm aware Access can only be used on one local machine, unless you put some networking system together yourself. There's no web-based version either that I know of.

Last time I used Access for anything (at all), you could put the database file on a shared drive and multiple people could use it. This was always clunky though.

You can do it via office365/sharepoint. You can deploy Access "apps" and let sharepoint online be the front end for the forms.

I would presume this absolutely sucks though?

That depends on your needs. If you think a desktop Access app is appropriate for your needs, but you want it online, then it would be a good enough solution. It's basically the same thing as in OP.

A desktop Access app is extremely often damn near perfect imho, except for the negative connotation - in my experience, a web app with comparable usability to an access app is typically considered "fcking awesome, but if it is actually an Access app, you'd get laughed out of the room.

The last time I looked at online Access apps, it was a bit of a joke....like ya, you could put individual forms up, but extremely limited functionality, has this changed? (This isn't surprising, making it completely portable would be extremely technically difficult, but has MS somewhat accomplished this?)

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