Ask HN: Any low code frameworks on top of Django? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any low code frameworks on top of Django?

41 pointsrlawson22 comments

Django is already pretty low code but there's a lot of times I'd just like to write a quick SQL snippet, display a nice grid and then define another couple of SQL snippets for handling actions on the grid. I can scaffold this out pretty quickly with standard MVT but is there a simpler way?

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Baserow uses Django as a superweapon. They use django db libs to generate the underlying database tables via a web UI. They take full advantage of dynamically generated models to query them too.

And of course I have my own idea for a web spreadsheet. The tables can be generated via UI and we can add small scripts to validate, filter, scheduled tasks etc. When stuff gets too complex for a low-code platform, we can drop down a layer of abstraction or migrate to traditional Django. It can reuse other Django apps like those CMS apps. Making a prototype of this.

https://baserow.io/blog/how-baserow-lets-users-generate-djan...

wow, that is very impressive. They have really pushed the ORM. Good luck with your prototype!

Thanks!

I'm also interested in something like this. I've been considering writing one because I already start most projects with djangobuilder.io, which generates a project, models, and test skeleton. I've found that very useful when I have a lot of models.

djangobuilder.io looks nice - thanks! Yeah so many times it seems like I want to display a grid and a few operations on that grid of data (a lot of times that could be handled with sql or sometimes with a little python). I end up repeating that pattern a lot

django admin? https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/ref/contrib/admin/

Well django admin is great but I want something I can low code a few screens in my main app. Say I want to present the user with a grid of orders to be processed and also an action for each row called "Release Order". I'd like to write a sql statement to display the orders and also a little python handler for the release order logic. I can of course do this with regular Django but it's a couple views, probably two templates, configure a couple urls and on that template pull in a friendlier js table like aggrid, etc

Well this isn't related to django, but it sounds like Retool may be what you're after: https://retool.com/

Thanks! I looked into retool and it's very nice but what I really want is an embeddable retool experience in Django. Cause for 50% of my app I need all the power Django provides. Then the other 50% is hey look at this grid and here are a few options for you. I guess I could split into 2 apps but then that has it's own cost.

Or make your own low-code django library, to create even more code you have to maintain.

Regarding accelerating UI, I’ve been building my UI for my product (https://amazing.photos) using Webflow and Django.

I convert all Webflow code into Django templates and neat JavaScript.

This approach with Webflow and Django is around 5-8x faster for me.

Interesting - so you use their designer to do the front end? And then export and hook it up to Django?

Exactly. Here’s a simple video I made explaining it: https://youtu.be/ohJzBkgSIMQ

I now have a more advanced version of the import script than the video that adds native async forms and allows for Django for loops. Let me know if you want it.

I just found this video the other day; Especially the "building a tool on top of Webflow" think resonates with what you created here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYRq60G5XTk

Thanks!

I'd love to take a look. Cool site by the way, looks great!

Thanks! Here’s the link to the repo: https://github.com/a-toms/webflow-to-django

I don't think anything is faster than django-admin. If you invest time in understanding how it works then you can accomplish a lot in very little time. Results are of course not perfect, but good enough for many quick-and-dirty projects.

datasette? https://datasette.io/

I was thinking datasette is read only - does it do crud now?

The Django/Postgres-specific Datasette "cousin" Django SQL Dashboard [1] lives side-by-side with the Django admin so you could in theory use the Django admin for a bunch of crud and build Datasette-like dashboards next to it with relatively low code. It's mostly still the database model building in the first place that is the bottleneck.

[1] https://datasette.io/tools/django-sql-dashboard

Interesting! I contribute to django-sql-explorer which is very similar. I'll take a look at how django-sql-dashboard is implemented. Thanks.

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