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Comment by toolittle | Hacker News Reader

I only watched the video, so it is a bit early to judge, but I wonder: 1. Why put that much effort in explaining it takes only 6 minutes in setting up a web app? Anyone who has done any serious web app knows how quickly you can set up a simple app really does not matter much for an app even of moderate size, let alone big ones? 2. Why yet another attempt to abstract away everything and using one language (python) only? What happens when you need to debug nitti-gritty js/css/html/sql?

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These tools are for simple CRUD apps for people who aren't necessarily strong developers to begin with but need to put together something anyway. That's why the demos focus on speed and only ever show the tiniest of applications.

I'd dispute that! There are much larger applications built on Anvil; it's just hard to build a two-week project for a demo video, and harder still to build a two-month one ;)

We're starting to post some larger examples (check out our "download portal" example at https://anvil.works/learn#examples - I'm also working on a video series building a SaaS app over the course of a few hours). But the biggest apps are, of course, our customers', and we can't really publish them as examples.

Fair enough. I may have been a bit harsh (though not really on purpose). I'll look through some of the larger examples. I just tend to think that if one's team has the chops to write something large and more complicated than a CRUD app, they aren't going to want to start here. That's not to say there's not a role for these types of tools...

What's the largest, most complex application running on Anvil today?

That I can talk about publicly? Probably https://lightningai.com/.

Their control panel drives companies' entire online marketing operation - creative, targeting, performance, and more - across multiple advertising services. That's a whole lotta UI. Their back end drives the advertising platforms' APIs (eg Google and Facebook), and it all hooks into great big machine learning operations that run on big beefy servers out in EC2. Not just a pretty CRUD app, that's for sure.

(Unfortunately, they know what their services are worth, so I can't just point you at a live demo ;) )

So, the UI/front0end of their app was created with and runs on Anvil, but the backend is entirely under their control? That's interesting. Very interesting.

Their backend is partially inside, partially outside Anvil (eg I believe the campaign management backend runs in our hosted server modules, but the compute-intensive machine learning is offloaded). And it's all under their control - it's their code!

The wonderful thing about the Uplink is that the boundary between "inside Anvil" and "outside Anvil" can be very fuzzy, because you use the same APIs. (See my "escape hatch" post above)

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