Hacker News Reader

Comment by meredydd | Hacker News Reader

> I would be impressed with a tool to quickly design a web application in the same way Visual Basic did 25 years ago

Me too! So we built one - https://anvil.works

The "Hello World" app takes 45 seconds (there's a video on the homepage).

The "Display a slideshow of images from Google Drive" app takes a whole five minutes, because I talk through it slowly (video at https://anvil.works/learn - scroll down).

If you want to demo (eg) a DB engine, you'll want the "uplink" that lets you call code on your workstation from your app. (There's a three-minute demo of us controlling a Raspberry Pi that way: https://anvil.works/blog/uplink).

View on HN

Great! What features are you planning to add in the near/long term? I think it would be great to have ready to use access to web APIs, separate the front-end from the back-end, and target other popular programming languages like Node.js.

I recommend to do a "Show HN" to get invaluable feedback from HN users.

I know it can be painful but listing your competitors will be useful.

More features...where do I start? Certainly more service integrations (there is already ready-to-use integration with several APIs, including Stripe, Google auth/drive/sheets, Active Directory for corporate users, etc, but there's always more to do). There's also a nifty DB upgrade on its way, as well as a beta of push/pull Git access to each app's source (that one's live today - there's a Git Access button in the IDE). Ultimately, though, it's all being driven by user feedback now.

We deliberately chose Python because Javascript (language and ecosystem) is a dumpster fire whose weaknesses keep getting papered over with a new framework-of-the-week. (Fun fact: The median modern web app is written with five programming languages and three frameworks. Take a moment to soak in how nuts that is).

Python lets us implement simple, idiomatic APIs for things that would require multiple frameworks, nested lambdas and async hell in JS. (We translate into async hell in the compiler :D)

Expect an HN post or two before long...

Overall it looks like a good tool, but a major part of the magic of VB6 is intellisense. Proper, full blown, everything you type, intellisense. And the modern version is phenomenally good these days, compared to C# and typescript it's painful programming in javascript, Ruby and Python as you have to remember so much more minutae and context switch a lot more.

You don't even seem to have basic auto-completion at the mo. Even hinting the names of your declared controls would be a start.

I worked in the Microsoft c# & asp.net world for many years (since 1.1). The company I worked for got acquired and our product essentially killed. Their product is in Java (among other things) and using eclipse. It is horrible.

I love every time I go back to c# to write a tool or test harness. Autocomplete and intellisense allow me to barely type and let the code fly out from my fingers getting my production closer to the speed of my head figuring the stuff out. The difference is amazing.

We know, and that is most definitely on its way. While we considered the half-way houses you suggest, it's sufficiently important that we don't want to half-ass it. Sublime Text-style autocomplete from other words in the document is nice for power users, but can be actively misleading for newbies, so we didn't want to offer anything except the real thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com