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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

It’s just Python.

The app state is just a class. State updates are methods in the class. And the UI is a reflection of the state.

It's rare to see this sort of clarity on a landing page. Even more impressed to see that it carried over into the documentation, which is excellent.

I've been a fan of the plotly/Dash framework, but this looks like an exciting alternative, feeling more immediately accessible without some of the quirks (like the pragmatic but weird-feeling 12 virtual columns, for example). I look forward to re-implementing some existing projects for comparison.

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Several years ago, I worked at an enterprise software company that partnered with plotly and we had to use Dash to build a Tableau-like drag and drop dashboard builder.

Dash had some amazing ideas and architecture, but suffered from too little hardcore developers working on the repo. Pynecone looks a whole lot like it was heavily inspired by Dash, but re-architected with the lessons of Dash power users.

I find the project incredibly impressive and well thought out. I cringe at transpilation into Next.js, but the target code is actually extremely clean and easy to follow/read/debug. Kudos to the team.

I would love to hear what your experience is.

We've been using Pynecone for a bit and are coming up against some problems.

For example trying to write a wrapper for AG Grid there is no way to pass a custom class attribute so you can't style the output with a theme.

I found it very difficult to do things like rich text boxes for a ChatGPT clone I was writing aimed at being child friendly. Ended up giving up when it became a bit spaghetti-ish and after the documentation stopped being useful beyond hello world apps.

I also built a chatgpt UI that was focused on early readers and kids. Feel free to clone and modify if you like.

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/easy-chat

Cofounder of Pynecone here - thanks for the feedback. We’re prioritizing improving our docs and example apps in the upcoming weeks and will have a ChatGPT clone example. Definitely want to improve the onboarding experience and showcase these more complex use cases.

Congratulations with the release of this very exciting framework! Can't wait to try it out.

That’s awesome - it looks like a really interesting project. Would you be able to address the specific criticism raised by parent, on rich text boxes? Is this a case of a documentation shortfall, or something more fundamental?

We want to support any UI feature that you can build with React/NextJS. We will expand our core to include components like rich text inputs but we also have a way to wrap any React library so you're not locked into the components we provide: https://pynecone.io/docs/advanced-guide/wrapping-react

Please, add examples of rich authn and authz flows with 2FA and email integration for account verification.

Hey! Don't take my comment as too negative, I do like the idea & enjoyed using Pynecone right to the point I got stuck. Best of luck improving it, I'll definitely circle back in the future

My projects are simple dashboards for internal use so I prioritize ugly and functional over aesthetic. technical verdicts from someone with more UI experience/affinity would likely help a lot more than my opinion.

"state is just a class" brings up so many questions though. How do you serialize state if it is "just a class"? Serializing the state is useful for all sorts of things, including debugging, reloading, and saving and loading application state.

Serializing state together with some code that operates on it may be doable but sounds either complicated or brittle.

It's not that it's the best way to do it; it's just a very straightforward articulation of their design philosophy that helps a first-time visitor know what to expect and what they might like (or not) about it.

Lisp did this decades ago.

How accessible is the output (WCAG, Code 508)? Or how easy is it to make it accessible? I could not find any hints on the website.

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