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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

I don't really get what this does. The front page feels like a lot of empty marketing, but I still don't understand how it works...?

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Seems like it’s Framer-meets-Retool.

Framer has a great UI builder, but doesn’t connect to backends very well. They have their own CMS but the net result is that you typically use it for marketing sites but not business app interfaces.

Retool can connect to a lot of different data sources but is ugly and wouldn’t help build a customer-facing app that I would feel proud of. They give you easy to use UI primitives to get you up and running fast.

This seems like a UI builder that can hook into backend systems.

Yes, in a way! Plasmic is a general visual React app builder that can be embedded into your existing React app or be deployed standalone. As such, we place a heavy emphasis on _design_, so you can build exactly the thing that you want, and on _integration_, so you're never limited by what Plasmic can do out of the box. A big part of this is being able to use your own React components in your Plasmic designs, which is a major escape hatch that lets you include any amount of data fetching or business logic that can be consumed by your Plasmic designs.

I think they're trying to invent a new market where none exists yet, and when you do that you HAVE to communicate very clearly. Basically I think they're a WYSIWYG editor for a React SPA. For me, this section helped:

https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic?tab=readme-ov-file#how...

Thanks! That's a lot more helpful. I understand the gist of its value offering now.

Still have questions about how component composition and layout work, but at least the readme is clearer about what the product IS.

For component composition and layout, Plasmic makes it easy to build responsive pages. Our primitives like stacks are all based on flexbox, though you can use absolute positioning if needed.

For some more detailed docs, check out https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/styling-and-layout/

Plasmic at its core is a general React app builder. You can create components, add interactivity, and connect to other data sources. You can also bring in your own React components, so there's endless possibilities in extending the tool for your needs.

Our users have used Plasmic to build all sorts of things, from websites and e-commerce storefronts, to Retool-like internal tools, to full web apps (major parts of the Plasmic visual editor itself is built with Plasmic!). The most popular use case we have is as a CMS -- once developers set up Plasmic, the marketers are able to design and publish sections of the website without developer involvement. One remarkable thing is that the dynamically-fetched Plasmic-generated design is part of the same React tree as the rest of your React app, so it is able to read from your React contexts, etc., making it possible to have rather deep and interesting integrations into your site.

Ultimately, Plasmic generates React code from your designs. This code can either live in your code base alongside the rest of your code, or be dynamically fetched (like in the CMS use case).

> You can also bring in your own React components

What does that mean? Does it mean that you can import your own components like using a standard import statement?

Basically, you set up a "custom app host" -- stand up your server (which has your code components), and you add a route (say `https://yoursite.com/plasmic-host`) that renders a special `<PlasmicCanvasHost/>` component. When you open a Plasmic project that uses your custom app host, it loads your `/plasmic-host`, and the `<PlasmicCanvasHost/>` component bootstraps the Plasmic visual editor into the page. So now Plasmic studio is actually running on your page, and it can access your code components that you have registered to be used with Plasmic. We never see your code; it's a run-time integration.

No, if you use codegen, you should register your component by providing additional necessary metadata, like importPath, importName and others. Then you can use you component in the Studio same way like other builtin components. Check https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/code-components-ref/ for more details.

Definitely a textbook example of too much splash.

If you pull all the marketing taglines together, it's a no/low-code app builder. We have those, what makes this different? That's the front page sell.

Thanks for the feedback, we're still iterating on the homepage and didn't expect to get posted here yet!

Our repo https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic might be a bit more concrete.

It's a visual page builder that integrates with React codebases. Content management is our biggest use case - i.e., dev team integrates with Plasmic, and then marketing/content/design teams can create landing pages on the marketing site.

(A newer use case is building applications as well, hence some of the comparisons with Retool etc. There's actually quite a bit of overlap between these use cases, esp. when considering external-facing "customer portal"-style applications.)

Same. Reading the page all the way down makes it look like a ReTool competitor?

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