Show HN: Instantly generate code for your Django/Node starter app, ORM and APIs
imagine.ai
imagine.ai
I noticed you're using Sequelize as an ORM for the Node.js version and was wondering if you evaluated other libraries for that.
I work at Prisma [1] and we're building a new kind of ORM for Node.js and TypeScript. We've also seen that many library authors (e.g. KeystoneJS, RedwoodJS, Blitz, Amplication, Wasp, ...) [2] and fullstack templates like Bedrock [3] are picking Prisma as their ORM instead of tools like Sequelize, TypeORM or lower-level libraries like knex.js.
I'm just curious to learn whether you were aware of Prisma and what made you pick Sequelize for this project in case you evaluated other options too :)
[1] https://github.com/prisma/prisma
[2] https://www.prisma.io/blog/prisma-the-complete-orm-inw24qjea...
For now, we support MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite, but are also planning to add support for Mongo. Do you have Mongo/NoSQL databases on your roadmap?
It would be great to connect on a zoom - I'm the co-founder of imagine, my email is anusheel@imagine.ai
Prisma has Mongo support coming really soon, and we will be speaking more about it at https://www.mongodb.com/live in July.
Other NoSQL and relational databases to follow, but we have no timeline for that yet.
I appreciate the option for containarization. Are there any plans to further ease deployment to AWS or Kubernetes? I.e. via generation of CloudFormation or Terraform scripts? Most front/back developers lack this kind of devops knowledge.
Each time we were acutely reminded of how much redundancy there exists while writing code, especially for commonly used components and features in software applications. Also, while we believe the current version of the no-code movement is awesome, we found it hard to scale these solutions for applications that required any reasonable level of custom logic.
So we built Imagine - a configurable, cross-framework platform for developers to easily generate high-quality code for common application components, which they can seamlessly integrate into their projects, without any lock-in - and allowing them to focus on writing custom business logic. Our goal has been to make the generated code clean, readable and following known software best practices (we love the 12—factor app philosophy!) - basically indistinguishable from what a skilled engineer would write.
To build the Imagine code generator, we initially considered building with regexes, but discarded that approach as it would have been highly error-prone. Given the high configurability we wanted to offer, we needed to be obsessed with correctness. To achieve this, we decided to use Haskell to build the code generator, as we were able to use Haskell’s built-in type system to represent rules to ensure correctness of the generated code. It also allowed us to enforce various constraints across an app’s specification using static checks.
In terms of features, our beta release allows you to define your starter settings, data models and relations via a UI and we instantly generate code for a dockerized project starter, ORMs, REST & GraphQL CRUD APIs and tests in both Django & Node.js.
We also have the following features on our roadmap: - Backend frameworks: - Node/Typescript - Backend features: - NoSQL databases (MongoDB, DynamoDB) - Support for migrations - Kubernetes deployment scripts - Logging and monitoring - Authentication (via multiple providers) - Payments integration (via multiple providers) - Frontend frameworks: - React (incl Redux, Hooks) - React native - Frontend features: - API calling - Views & components - Storybooks
We’d like to thank you in advance for trying our product out - we’re still early in development, and would love your feedback and suggestions as we push to make Imagine better everyday!