4 ms·

Software development: creating web CRUD interfaces quickly. Here's the orders table, here's the customers table, here's the products table. Join them, present t

Software development: creating web CRUD interfaces quickly. Here's the orders table, here's the customers table, here's the products table. Join them, present them with a nice UI that scales down to basic smartphones, make some fields editable, some sortable, some filterable. Now take a subset of the result and make that its own table with a search form, and so on. Every solution I've tried is either too narrow (e.g. works on one table or kind of data only), too broad (too much boilerplate), hard to plug into existing data without massive ETL (SAP, Oracle APEX..) or cloud-based apps which are fine for a mom and pop store but basically useless for scenarios with millions of entries.

londons_explore 6y ago
+1 to this. Code has been written tens of thousands of times to take data from a webform, put it in a database, and display it on a webpage. It's about time someone could just put that in a standard, simple, easy to use, yet extensive, library or service. Simple things like defining a field on the frontend, in the server API, in the data model, and again in the database schema should be a thing of the past.
- asdfman123 6y ago
  Well, there's Wordpress, isn't there? You can make a basic web application pretty quickly with no code. And there's also MVC platforms that auto generate a lot of code. In ASP.NET MVC (and many other platforms) you can just define the data fields and it will generate views, models, controllers and DB scripts automatically. Which is well and good until you have to process business logic, at which point you need a developer.
xixixao 6y ago
I have no personal experience with it but Retool looked nice, and probably covers some of your requirements. Definitely an interesting problem to solve!
mywacaday 6y ago
Out of interest what did you try and find most acceptable?
asdfman123 6y ago
Well, the whole field of software development is geared towards solving that problem, isn't it? You can have something highly customizable (e.g. write a web application in some common language), or you can try to create some out-of-the-box solution that works great for certain apps but quickly becomes a mess when you try to go beyond it. The core problem is there's a lot of complexity that's not always obvious and it has to be dealt with somehow.
justaguyhere 6y ago
How would this work in practice though? Sorry if the question seems dumb. For your own example : orders, customers and products. How would you generate a UI that matches design decisions of your product? Without specifying super detailed rules, in which case you could write it yourself? What am I missing?

londons_explore 6y ago

+1 to this. Code has been written tens of thousands of times to take data from a webform, put it in a database, and display it on a webpage. It's about time someone could just put that in a standard, simple, easy to use, yet extensive, library or service. Simple things like defining a field on the frontend, in the server API, in the data model, and again in the database schema should be a thing of the past.

asdfman123 6y ago
Well, there's Wordpress, isn't there? You can make a basic web application pretty quickly with no code. And there's also MVC platforms that auto generate a lot of code. In ASP.NET MVC (and many other platforms) you can just define the data fields and it will generate views, models, controllers and DB scripts automatically. Which is well and good until you have to process business logic, at which point you need a developer.

xixixao 6y ago

I have no personal experience with it but Retool looked nice, and probably covers some of your requirements. Definitely an interesting problem to solve!

mywacaday 6y ago

Out of interest what did you try and find most acceptable?

asdfman123 6y ago

Well, the whole field of software development is geared towards solving that problem, isn't it? You can have something highly customizable (e.g. write a web application in some common language), or you can try to create some out-of-the-box solution that works great for certain apps but quickly becomes a mess when you try to go beyond it. The core problem is there's a lot of complexity that's not always obvious and it has to be dealt with somehow.

justaguyhere 6y ago

How would this work in practice though? Sorry if the question seems dumb. For your own example : orders, customers and products. How would you generate a UI that matches design decisions of your product? Without specifying super detailed rules, in which case you could write it yourself? What am I missing?