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I used to write GUIs with Delphi and occasionally VB in the 90s. It was so much simpler than what we have now. I was hoping by now we'd have a tool as powerful

by rr808 4y ago

I used to write GUIs with Delphi and occasionally VB in the 90s. It was so much simpler than what we have now. I was hoping by now we'd have a tool as powerful but despite all the expansion of the industry still nothing. I was hoping WASM would result in something similar. Anyone have a good platform for writing basic crud apps?

Gigachad 4y ago
>Anyone have a good platform for writing basic crud apps? Rails is very fast to get started with but I find it unmaintainable for anything that lasts longer than a few years due to being untyped. AdonisJS seems like a much better option to go with today as it picks up a lot of the conveniences of Rails while being TypeScript.
chadcmulligan 4y ago
Delphi's pretty good for making cross platform apps. Run on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, (and a bit of linux) nice 3rd party components for pretty well everything. You can now use Skia as the graphics engine so looks just like the web browser.
mike_hearn 4y ago
It can live again! Next week I'll be giving a talk at KotlinConf in Amsterdam on how to write CRUD DB apps using Jetpack Compose ... for Desktop. Come along or watch when the talks are uploaded. I'll be demoing: • A simple Compose CRUD app that connects directly to Postgres using its native protocol. Users log in to the DB as themselves. No web servers, no HTML, JS, CSS, REST, JSON or even HTTP. Just Kotlin and a bit of SQL to setup the schemas and object security. jOOQ auto-generates language bindings and type safe SQL API by reflecting the database. • A drop-dead simple workflow for deploying the app and updating users. Just like a web app the entire release process (bundling, packaging for each OS, uploading, icon generation, even making a download page) is done with one command. Users update to the latest version every time the app launches, like a web app would update. I'll be demoing how quickly this can be set up and done with Conveyor (my own product, natch), and you can do it all from your laptop. • Visual layout design. Just like React, Jetpack Compose doesn't have a visual UI designer. But there's a cunning trick. Using the JavaFX Scene Builder and GPT-4 you can convert FXML to Jetpack Compose Kotlin code, giving you a nice designer that helps you quickly rough out a layout visually and then use it even from a totally different toolkit. I used it to help develop the demo - mind blowing stuff! Obviously nothing about any of that is Kotlin specific, you could do the same with any language that runs well on the desktop. At some point I hope to make a similar demo with Python using GraalPython (why jvm - because it has mature portable UI toolkits, very mature SQL libraries+db drivers, is easy to deploy to every OS from your laptop and has the best language interop). I wouldn't try to make the next Instagram this way but for the apps that fit the advantages are numerous. The code for this demo is simple because leaning in to your RDBMS gives you so much functionality for free that you'd end up duplicating in an ad-hoc and often bug-prone manner on the web. Almost all the code is UI logic. Historically distribution was the sticking point and something Delphi/VB never really solved once you got beyond "stick an exe in an SMB shared folder". Conveyor solves that which is why I'm doing the demo, to advertise how resolving a developer usability bottleneck in one area allows you to increase usability in other areas too.

by rr808 4y ago

Gigachad 4y ago

>Anyone have a good platform for writing basic crud apps? Rails is very fast to get started with but I find it unmaintainable for anything that lasts longer than a few years due to being untyped. AdonisJS seems like a much better option to go with today as it picks up a lot of the conveniences of Rails while being TypeScript.

chadcmulligan 4y ago

Delphi's pretty good for making cross platform apps. Run on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, (and a bit of linux) nice 3rd party components for pretty well everything. You can now use Skia as the graphics engine so looks just like the web browser.

mike_hearn 4y ago

It can live again! Next week I'll be giving a talk at KotlinConf in Amsterdam on how to write CRUD DB apps using Jetpack Compose ... for Desktop. Come along or watch when the talks are uploaded. I'll be demoing: • A simple Compose CRUD app that connects directly to Postgres using its native protocol. Users log in to the DB as themselves. No web servers, no HTML, JS, CSS, REST, JSON or even HTTP. Just Kotlin and a bit of SQL to setup the schemas and object security. jOOQ auto-generates language bindings and type safe SQL API by reflecting the database. • A drop-dead simple workflow for deploying the app and updating users. Just like a web app the entire release process (bundling, packaging for each OS, uploading, icon generation, even making a download page) is done with one command. Users update to the latest version every time the app launches, like a web app would update. I'll be demoing how quickly this can be set up and done with Conveyor (my own product, natch), and you can do it all from your laptop. • Visual layout design. Just like React, Jetpack Compose doesn't have a visual UI designer. But there's a cunning trick. Using the JavaFX Scene Builder and GPT-4 you can convert FXML to Jetpack Compose Kotlin code, giving you a nice designer that helps you quickly rough out a layout visually and then use it even from a totally different toolkit. I used it to help develop the demo - mind blowing stuff! Obviously nothing about any of that is Kotlin specific, you could do the same with any language that runs well on the desktop. At some point I hope to make a similar demo with Python using GraalPython (why jvm - because it has mature portable UI toolkits, very mature SQL libraries+db drivers, is easy to deploy to every OS from your laptop and has the best language interop). I wouldn't try to make the next Instagram this way but for the apps that fit the advantages are numerous. The code for this demo is simple because leaning in to your RDBMS gives you so much functionality for free that you'd end up duplicating in an ad-hoc and often bug-prone manner on the web. Almost all the code is UI logic. Historically distribution was the sticking point and something Delphi/VB never really solved once you got beyond "stick an exe in an SMB shared folder". Conveyor solves that which is why I'm doing the demo, to advertise how resolving a developer usability bottleneck in one area allows you to increase usability in other areas too.