Comment by orcasushi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orcasushi | Hacker News Reader

Having myself used some no/low-code tools (service-now, mendix, outsystems), I do think they are the future, but... I think they suffer from their business model, which often aims complete vendor lock in to milk their customers as long as possible. This is currently their only way to earn back the hard invested money of developing such a tool.

We need a, open source, community driven, no-code tool.

Using existing tools I often suffered from these things: - closed source. - expensive monthly fees. - Any apps build with it are not really property of the developer, but are intellectual property of the low code tool corp - either bad ux ui or not horizontally or vertically scalable - Datamodel, Algorithm or business logic can not really be extracted from the low code platform. - You now need to become a specialist in this low code platform. These low code platforms outdate faster then the typical programming language. - The best developers look down on it so you get "lesser" developers. - If a feature is not available in the low code platform then you are stuck. - If there is a real bug in the low code platform you are screwed because you now need to open a ticket, but the engineer looking at the ticket is more help-desk then engineer. The majority of tickets they solve are from dummies not understanding the platform and they assume you are one of them. Will take several months to convince them it was a bug and was never solved during the time I was on the project (2 years). - You cannot run it on premise, unless you have deep pockets - They have non or terrible git integration. Or other collaboration problems. - Due to their dynamic nature are often slow in performance. - Corps HR department runs a different low code platform then their finance department and now it becomes a political shit show.

Terrible situation when you grow beyond the low-code platform and need to move away from it.

Shameless, shameless, shameless, plug here. But have you tried tools like:

Budibase (cofounder) - https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

Saltcorn

Thanks for being transparent. If someone mentions a problem, and you have the solution, you should be able to politely and gracefully plug it imho.

Is this tool similar to Hugo?

No. It's an open source low code platform for building internal tools / business apps.

Hugo is static site generator for building websites.

We use Hugo for the Budibase website.

We use Budibase for a multitude of use cases, include: Applicant tracking Api documenting CRM OKRs Growth management Onboarding and about 100 other use cases (dashboards, admin panels, data collection, client portals, and more)

Amazon, NHS, Deloitte, F1, Audi, and others have used it. We had 50,000 downloads last month.

I'm not sure I share your enthusiasm for LC/NC as being the wave of the future. That being said, I have only spent a few afternoons with any of them.

I do agree 100% with your assessment that is incredibly painful to migrate your systems from one of these onto a mature, open-source web development ecosystem. I've witnessed the tail end of one of these Herculean efforts and it wasn't pretty.

The existing LC/NC platforms claim that their sweet spot is prototyping or MVP-style products. Even if one shaves a few months of development time off with this (and even that is not clearly the case), the extra work of building the new system, migrating all the data, hosting, etc, doesn't pass the smell test for me.

Open source web dev has gotten infinitely better for basic CRUD style apps. Hire a few devs with a couple years of experience, maybe even a few out of college, with one experienced engineering manager, and I can guarantee you will get a better proof of concept with React/Node, or any of the other widely adopted open source web dev platforms currently on offer.

Another ServiceNow developer here -- I feel that no-code tools are great for internal tooling, but that they fall quite short when it comes to crafting a proper user experience. To put it another way: there will always be a crossover point where the platform goes from helping you to hurting you. You'll usually have to rely on forcing your users into training as a crutch, unless you're willing to invest considerable time in hacking around limitations and maintaining those hacks. This works just fine if you have a captive audience (internal employees, customers with contractual lock-in), but is basically unacceptable when it comes to the cutthroat world of commercial app development.

I think this tradeoff is pretty well reflected in how ServiceNow's workspaces feature failed when it first launched in 2018 -- and why it has since been overhauled. Sure, they kept the original plug-and-play no-code UI, but they retooled it to work on top of a full-code framework that fully interoperates with the no-code UI. It's the best of both worlds: you can rapidly slap together a UI, then replace individual components of the UI with your own code as you go.

Most no/low-code tools also really suck at version control, in my experience. That's enough to make me loathe working with them, even when they do save me time :/

> We need a, open source, community driven, no-code tool.

What is with the obsession of devaluing technical skills so that non-technical business users can increase their profit?

Charge for your cost saving/tech-enabling tools.

Stop devaluing tech.

Rational non-technical business users are exactly the reason we need open source tooling.

What rational person would build the foundation of their business on a closed source, proprietary web development framework? Only the less experienced or less than rational would choose this setup. We have decades of evidence that companies that develop these will inevitably:

1. Not support the use cases your business needs as you grow, despite your pleas.

2. End support for a necessary feature that you need. If you're lucky, you can continue to operate on an older version or a fork. But then you don't get any new functionality going forward.

3. Simply charge you more.

4. Go out of business.

There is a niche in exploiting the naivete of such business owners. That doesn't seem to be the goal of Budibase given that you can always pick up where they leave off in any of the above scenarios.

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