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Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source
- theon144 8y agoI like the subtle nod through capitalization in the phrase "It’s been An Incredible Journey".
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoThough unlike an Incredible Journey, this is the right way to shut down: Open up your code and contribute what you did to society.
- tannhaeuser 8y agoI think it isn't meant so much as a gift to society as it is a best-efforts gesture to your existing users regarding their sites and investment: > We’re releasing it open source both so you can keep using it, and so we can share our ideas about how to build UI tools
- jpochtar 8y agoIt was both of those two things— we wanted to do right by our users who trusted us with a dependency, but also because we think we did some things differently than your average WYSIWYG builder, and wanted those ideas to help move the standard forward.
- ams6110 8y agoMaybe, maybe not. Did they have investors? The code is an asset. Can they sell the code/IP for any significant amount of money? If so, they should do that and pay back the investors/reduce their losses. Maybe there are no buyers, or the investors are on board with the open-source plan, who knows. But it's not always the right answer or even possible.
- HeWhoLurksLate 8y agoThis is a very narrow view. The code is not just a company asset, it's a customer asset as well, and their needs ought to be considered as well. Have you ever had software you were using just stop working because remote servers failed or something of the sort? What about if they never fixed that problem? Software isn't exactly like buying groceries where you can go to a different grocer and get a different, equivalent solution. Instead, it's more like a bakery, where a baker has their own (in software terms, proprietary) recipe that they use. If that bakery goes away, their recipe might go too, and that would directly affect those who buy their bread, especially if it was a joint that sold to other businesses, as software normally is. If I were that baker, and I went bankrupt, I would probably give that recipe to my customers- after all, I can't profit off of it, but they still need it. Unless I'm extremely mistaken, they haven't been bought by anyone else and won't be resuming operations ever. If they had been bought out, that would be different- their storefront would still exist, albeit somewhere else, likely- and people would still be able to get your products. I am a believer in Right to Repair, and the overall principle here is similar- documentation of products is really helpful in fixing things, and if a company goes out of business, and has no recourse or any way to deliver support, it would be amazing for customers if they publicly released as much documentation as possible. To be clear, I don't think that using an old thing forever is a good idea, but it often takes a long time to find something else that fits the bill perfectly.
- ryanpetrich 8y agoFor those that haven't seen it: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ (though unlike most of the startups on that blog, Pagedraw seems to be shutting down in the most open and responsible way)
- Aeolun 8y agoThat’s a fairly depressing read. While I think it’s understandable the founders run off with a ton of money, it’s not really a great state of affairs.
- jpochtar 8y agoThank you! I was worried this would be too subtle :D :D
- badfrog 8y agoIs there also a hidden meaning in the second We're here: > We’re moving on, but We’re very proud of the technology we’ve built.
- jpochtar 8y agolol no, I wrote that and it's a typo :P
- 33degrees 8y agoMore details on the shutdown here, with some good insights: https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-building-a-compiler-startup-for-3-years-4473405161cd https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui...
- thedangler 8y agovery interested in the vuejs implementation. How soon is soon, now that its moving to open source?
- moreira 8y agoOdds are, never. If some volunteer open-source developer decides to pick it up, it might happen, but as the company's shutting down, any "soon" promised by them in the past is obviously now a "never". Note: That page is clearly just their old homepage + the shutdown message; whatever it says was written pre-shutdown.
- jpeg_hero 8y agoSad but true, from having seen upfront a similar process. It takes just a fraction of work to bundle all the tech up for open source, but at the point of shutdown everyone is usually just toast... sadness to it too. Most people can't put in that day or two required to jettison it into open source land, right now, and then in a month or two the rot has already set in. Hopefully these guys buck the trend, because there looks like there is some cool stuff in there.
- dinedal 8y agoThe link to the source is right on the page? https://github.com/Pagedraw/pagedraw https://github.com/Pagedraw/pagedraw
- jpochtar 8y agoThis is correct. We wanted to preserve the pre-shutdown homepage, but there is no future development planned.
- tln 8y agoMe too :) I didn't find "vue" anywhere in the source except for the logo in the landing page. No branches besides master, so if there was any effort put in to supporting Vue by the pagedraw team it didn't make it to this open source release. Still, it's great the source got released, thank you Pagedraw folks!
- nathan_f77 8y agoSorry to hear about the shutdown, and it looks like it was a pretty useful tool. Great that they open sourced it. The source code looks very interesting (and a bit unusual for a React app.) [1] Looks like Coffeescript + "Coffeescript JSX", which I hadn't heard of before. I didn't look too closely, but I didn't see how they're doing state management in the editor. No Redux in the package.json [2]. I was hoping that I might be able to repurpose some of this for a new project I'm working on, but it all looks very foreign to me [3], and the file organization doesn't seem to follow any conventions that I'm familiar with. [1] https://github.com/Pagedraw/pagedraw/tree/master/src https://github.com/Pagedraw/pagedraw/tree/master/src [2] https://github.com/Pagedraw/pagedraw/blob/master/package.json https://github.com/Pagedraw/pagedraw/blob/master/package.jso... [3] https://github.com/Pagedraw/pagedraw/blob/master/src/editor/edit-page.cjsx https://github.com/Pagedraw/pagedraw/blob/master/src/editor/...
- dinedal 8y agoThe reason they didn't use redux was explained in the medium post.[1] > We just used global mutable state instead of the whole immutable Reduxy patterns people liked to enforce. It was simple and it worked great. [1] https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-building-a-compiler-startup-for-3-years-4473405161cd https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui...
- jpochtar 8y agohttp://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html is how we felt about Coffeescript + JSX
- shubhamjain 8y agoFrankly, picking a non-conventional language in order to associate yourself with "true hackers" is PG's least useful advice. I am not even sure if he would still agree today. Hackers use the language they are most comfortable with and that gets things done. Everything else is secondary. I wrote a blog post on the subject [1]. [1]: https://shubhamjain.co/2018/12/01/why-paul-graham-wrong/ https://shubhamjain.co/2018/12/01/why-paul-graham-wrong/
- azinman2 8y agoEver heard of them, but love the concept. Perhaps the right thing would be someone like Sketch to incorporate this and make it mature and maintained. They could charge a nice extra for doing so.
- abraae 8y agoOne absolute rule for success in software is that there are no absolute rules. From their post mortem https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-building-a-compiler-startup-for-3-years-4473405161cd https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui... > Performance is never a justification for anything if you haven’t measured it This just isn't true. Anyone with a reasonable amount of experience is often able to look ahead - well before any code is written - and see how performance could be better if road A is taken instead of road B. Its madness in that case to blindly choose a road without even thinking about performance - even if it is unmeasurable and in the future. There's more in the same vein: > Go back to step 2 and make sure you completely ignore performance, because you probably haven’t. Now I have to imagine that these guys don't genuinely believe what they wrote - but in that case, ditch the words "never" and "completely ignore" and go for something more reasonable. (Of course that would make the phrasing less dramatic and click-baity, which is maybe what it takes to get eyeballs these days)
- lbotos 8y agoI think you missed the gist? They are saying if you are saying "this piece needs to be more performant" you need to measure that first, before making your choice of what to make better. You are saying, "you can with an idea in mind optimize before you go and it will have better performance" but the current prevailing business logic is do not optimize until you know it's "the right thing". AKA premature optimization is bad. Did I mis-interpret what you are saying?
- ams6110 8y agoI think GP is saying, if you are at a point in development where you can choose A or B, and A has foreseeable better performance or scalability, all else being equal choose A. A lot of assumptions there and real world is almost never that clear-cut. The general advice of "don't optimize until you've measured" is still almost always correct.
- magicalhippo 8y ago> The general advice of "don't optimize until you've measured" is still almost always correct. The issue of course being that when designing code, various design choices can have significant performance implications, and can be very hard to change once implemented and in production.
- k__ 8y agoSad. Some time ago someone asked if they still in business and they said they had planned some things. I liked their idea, but well. Looking into Draftbit and FramerX right now.
- syntaxing 8y agoI'm actually really disappointed that I found out about them because they're shutting down. This looks perfect to me because I've been wanting to make some sites fast but I don't have the time to expand my React skills currently. Does anyone have a good recommendation for an alternative?
- snazz 8y agoThey’re making a desktop app (that will be released as open source as they shut down the website). Maybe it would fill your needs?
- jitl 8y agoUse the open-source desktop app they released.
- pault 8y agoFramer X is supposed to have a similar feature set, but Mac only. Also, are you sure you need react?
- syntaxing 8y ago
- pier25 8y agoWe've been writing HTML for a couple of decades now. There have been dozens (hundreds?) of WYSIWYG editors and nothing has really caught on. My hypothesis is that unlike other mediums like paper or video, the elastic nature of the web makes understanding the positioning paradigms/box model/etc a necessity that no visual tool can really abstract. By the time you understand all that, it's just faster to write and maintain code.
- JesseAldridge 8y agoSquareSpace, Wix, Shopify, and Elementor (a WordPress plugin) have all caught on. The first three are more than page-builders, but the page-builder is an important component. They're just not popular with the HN crowd.
- iliketosleep 8y agoSo true, I have seen total beginners create nice looking pages with the tools you've mentioned, but if they stay in it for the long haul they find themselves limited by these tools - after which they either gain the technical skills required and move away from the page-builder or hire a dev. That's why I personally won't use such tools. They make it quicker to begin with, but I'll inevitably find myself fighting against the tool.
- mamurphy 8y agoWhat kind of beginners? If someone wants to make websites for a living, of course they need to get the skills. If they just want one website, those tools are often enough.
- iliketosleep 8y agoI'm not referring to individuals who wants to make money as a web devs. What I'm referring to is the entrepreneur who lacks technical skills but is able to put up a nice little website using page-builders, and after a while wants to take it further and add features not supported by the page-builder.
- Jeaye 8y agoI tried using PageDraw for LetsBet when we ported our ClojureScript + React codebase to desktop with Electron. All of our designs are done in Figma, by our designer, so we were trying to rely on the Figma project importer. Unfortunately, the importer was very unreliable, bringing in something that looked like a Vangough-like representation of what had been designed. Basically, our designer would have to use Pagedraw's editor to build the UI, but it simply lacked the feature set compared to PageDraw. Integrating with ClojureScript ended up working, but it was a real pain. That's less on them than us though, so I won't fault them for not supporting every language which compiles to JS. However, PageDraw never worked in Firefox. Perhaps now that it's going open source, this can be prioritized, but it was a serious issue for me, since don't use anything else. Just for PageDraw, I installed Chromium; they had a desktop app, but it was much less stable than the site, in my experience. PageDraw had some annoying bugs, as well. Invisible components in Figma would be imported as visible, but I could work around that. However, there were codegen issues with multi-states which required me to go into the code and make tweaks. I had reached out to Gabriel several times with reproduction cases and debug info, but never heard back. Aside from that, a slew of UX issues (copied right from my notes): * Add a "Select children" button when only one item is selected; it shows up when multiple are selected, but not one * Add a "Delete branch" button which deletes the selected and all children * Allow searching for component within project * Allow viewing of an image's source, if it's imported from Figma * Allow inter-project component references, so I can not have every screen in the same project * Allow importing of path-based icons with overlaps from Figma; currently, they're all broken * Allow selecting multiple items with overlapping properties and setting them all at once I love the idea of PageDraw and I wanted so badly for it to help us with our app development and converting Figma designs to React code which we can use from ClojureScript. Alas, the experience was viable for neither me nor my designer. Thanks for trying, PageDraw devs, and thanks even more for open sourcing your work as part of this shut down. Best of luck in your future endeavors.
- jameslk 8y ago> Ultimately, we think Pagedraw is the wrong product. We think you can get 90% of the benefits of Pagedraw by just using JSX better. Our findings on this will be controversial, as they go entirely against the current “best practices,” so we’ll save them for a later blog post. I'd like to hear more about this. I'm not sure if it was ever turned into a blog post? I don't understand how using JSX differently can eliminate the need for a visual editor for components.
- iliketosleep 8y agoYou've probably seen their blog post from other comments, which doesn't directly address the issue. They essentially made a visual editor for developers - this is the crux of the issue. It's easy for developers to add, preview, and edit components without a purpose-built visual editor. They appear to suggest that following some of the "technical lessons" in their blog post is what these devs really need - not a visual editor. Having said that, a visual editor would be great for designers who don't want to get their hands dirty with coding.
- realusername 8y agoThat's exactly the whole problem with web editors: - If they abstract a lot, you can target designers but then it inevitably produce unmaintainable spaghetti code because it does not know exactly where you are going - If you abstract it less, you can only target developers but what's the point for developers to use an UI when they have to know how to code in the first place?
- elcomet 8y agoThat's true for now, but I believe we will get there eventually. Who is writing assembly code anymore ? You can argue that compilers produce unmaintanable spaghetti assembly code, which is certainly true. But almost no one will look at the assembly output. The next step we are currently in: a lot of new languages compile to C. And it produces absolutely unreadable code. But who wants to read and write C when you can get the same speed with a much nicer language ? I agree visual editing may be more complicated than compiling / transpiling, but I believe we'll get there eventually, and people will no longer read and write css manually.
- codegeek 8y agoInteresting that they launched pagedraw exactly 1 year ago (Feb 26th, 2018) and I remember reading that launch post [0] So it took them 1 year to shut it down ? Is that a quick failure ? Wonder why they didn't go any further. Was it Funding related ? Curious. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16467387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16467387
- avinium 8y agoI think a year is more than enough to figure out if you have the wrong product. Kudos to the team - they might have been able to raise money to keep plugging away, but they've seen the writing on the wall. I know nothing about their company or their team, but I do know that product-market fit is something you have, or you don't. There's no real middle ground, so if you don't have it, you need to madly iterate/pivot until you do, or cut your losses and move onto the next project.
- jaequery 8y agolooks like they just did not find the type of investors who would help them all the way to the finish line. i hate to see products that are trying to solve hard problems but falls short due to funding.
- Zelmor 8y agoWas this like a wysiwyg editor for badly performing web applications?
- fogetti 8y agoThe really funny thing that the same cycle repeats in jsland that we have seen in java land a decade ago. XD I can't even put into words how hilarious is this. We need visual editors. We don't need visual editors. We need visual editors. We don't need visual editors... Etc
- jpochtar 8y agoWe pretty explicitly said "hey, the web is a regression from the 90s... let's just make a company that fixes that"
- revskill 8y agoI'd love to have a similar product, but will produce only the React Element in json form only.