Show HN: Yazz Pilot – Self Service Apps Without the IT Department
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So the back story is: I first thought about building a web based development tool since I was at University where I built a Hypercard style development tool called OpenPage (using C++ on Solaris) as my Computer Science project which scored as one of the highest projects of the year at Machester University, UK (1994). My beginners confidence didn't carry on into anything concrete though, until 2000, when I wrote the second version in Java, but this didn't go anywhere. For a third version I tried to develop this in Javascript, Ruby and Sintra in 2007, but I didn't realise how difficult a problem this was. Also, in 2008 a fourth attempt was made where I tried again in Erlang, but it didn't go anywhere. So I hung up my boots and then in 2013 after building a startup NemCV with Franco Soldera I tried a fifth time and built a Clojure/Clojurescript based tool called Clojure on Coils, which was pretty cool, but most people thought it was a joke. Eventually after a couple of years I realised that I didn't understand the problem well enough, so for attempt six decided to outsource the problem by investing in a project by Chris Granger and Rob Attori, called LightTable/Eve. They tried to solve the problem of building a usable development system, but by 2018, they too realised that this was a huge task, and very hard to monetise.
So, I took a step back and realised that I now had a lot of knowledge about the subject, but needed to find a way to build something that can be commercially viable as an entry point, as this is a problem that 10,000s of companies have tackled and failed at (since the 1980s - just pick up a 1980s edition of Personal Computer to see many companies attempting the same thing). So I am now taking baby steps with a seventh attempt, by building a tool for enterprise users to build small webapps which can integrate with other systems, based on the look and feel of one of my favorite products of all time, Visual Basic 6. The product is called Pilot, and has a simple VB style editor, and allows you to build GUI apps, and microservices. It uses a simple component model based on 1 Javascript function per component, for both server side and front end components. It uses NodeJS, SQLite, and VueJS. It used to run as an Electron dekstop app but the I decided to dump Electron once I made Pilot container native so that it can run on Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Ubuntu Snap, as Electron would make the container runtimes too large. So the big focus now is to make alot of integrations so that people who work in large enterprises and just want to build a GUI really fast can build an app on top 3Scale, Mulesoft, Kong, Rest APIs, Postgres or other enterprise stuff.
There have been many people involved in this project and I give my thanks to them, since they have written alot of the code. Unfortunately I am the only person who is happy to put my name to the commits as I have a very forward thinking employer, Red Hat, although there have been major contributors from Google and Microsoft as well. Also, I must stress that this project and the views of myself and other team members in no way represents the views of our employers at Red Hat, Google, or Microsoft.
The project is still very rough around the edges, but please feel free to reach out to me for any questions that you may have.
Of course I do realize that some ideas need complex tooling, such as building Pilot itself, although the visual editor of pilot is actually built itself as a Pilot component, so Pilot is a partially bootstrapped system itself right now
Most quick app needs for the common person trying to find better ways to do their job, in my experience, tend to be of the "I want to collect or collate some data and output some reports" and for that Access might be the better starting model, maybe taking some UX inspiration from the way people use/abuse Excel in similar contexts.
Cool project though, don't let my thoughts (which could easily be quite wrong) stop you, especially if your target is people who do (or want to) dev a bit rather than people who would prefer not.
I've seen some tools like that and the big non-tech problem was always how to sell. Indeed there are a lot of developers that wouldn't use such tool, but there is a huge market that can benefit from it and it's awesome to see Zubair aiming on the right spot and with one of the best approaches: Open Source!
I'm closely looking forward to see Pilot reaching the cloud :)
Aren't you the Beads guy (http://beadslang.org/)? I have seen it before and it looks pretty cool
In the future we already have plans to support active directory and other security models
But https://www.retool.io, https://bubble.io/, Mendix, Outsystems, Oracle Apex are all much better paid options than Pilot
And https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ is probably a better Open Source option
Anyway, it is still very early days for this tool, so still a long way to go
The downside I'm thinking of is, for example:
You build an app for people to apply for jobs at your company.
AppMaker won't support that unless you pay for a Gsuite license for every job applicant. Or do the external user facing stuff in something else and integrate...but that kills the whole purpose of low code.