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Show HN: A better visual builder for complex business logic
I’m Frank, part of the engineering team re-imagining how software is built at Superblocks. We’re an extensible low-code platform that developers use to build mission-critical internal apps and workflows.
We just launched “Control Blocks”, a visual builder for backend business logic that enables developers to drag and drop “blocks” (conditional, loop, parallel, try/catch, variables etc.) onto a canvas and construct cohesive business logic that reads linearly like code.
The industry's approach to visual builders thus far has primarily been free-form flow diagrams where lines define the “control”. This approach works fine for a small set of blocks. However, as logical complexity increases, it quickly becomes impossible to read and debug. We wanted to take a much different approach that catered to the enterprise developer by retaining the same abstractions as code.
With Control Blocks, developers get a visual programming language that looks, feels, and scales like code. We provide the core primitives that allow you to build visually in Superblocks what you would through code. Some of these primitives, such as our take on parallelism, offer a much simpler abstraction than code. With this approach, operations like debugging and refactoring feel much more “native”. With this as our foundation, we’ve found that it is much easier to design features for testing, tracing, reusability, breakpoints, generative AI, and more.
On the technical side, we used this as an opportunity to improve our core execution engine so that it can provide the performance and reliability needed for enterprise usage. We migrated from TypeScript to Golang and started utilizing V8 for our binding resolution engine.
Read the linked blog and watch the embedded video and let’s have a conversation about your thoughts on our new take on this visual builder.
- ushakov 3y agoDoes it work on localhost?
- frankgrecojr 3y agoYep! You can use our agent to run it locally with Docker. Just go to "org settings -> agent" in our site and use the deployment instructions.
- ushakov 3y agoWhat about versioning? Can I store the workflows in my git repo?
- frankgrecojr 3y agoYou'll be able to in a few weeks! Stay tuned.
- antonyl 3y agoHow does this compare to Retool Workflows? https://retool.com/products/workflows/ https://retool.com/products/workflows/
- frankgrecojr 3y agoI've used it a bit and find it to align more with the free form node approach where the lines between them define the "control". I think this approach where we introduce a visual programming language has the potential to change the way the industry views products like these. There's something about the ability to drag on a try catch, use a native break block in a loop, etc. that feels very "like code".
- hitekker 3y agoNo idea why you’re being downvoted. Your answer sounds fine to me.
- frankgrecojr 3y agohaha thanks!
- aroc 3y agoAre you a PM at Retool?
- verdverm 3y agoor other OSS projects that are similar, like https://n8n.io/ https://n8n.io/
- frankgrecojr 3y agon8n AFAIK is a workflow builder whereas at Superblocks, we are an Application builder (in addition to a workflow builder). We enable developers to build user interfaces that "bind" to APIs that they build with this feature.
- shrimpx 3y agoThat's cool, it's kind of like Scratch [*] for business. Presumably the market is people who don't like Retool because it is too high-level (not enough control) and don't like code because it's too low-level (too much boilerplate and tool complexity). The risk is that the finer grained control stuff is too much like code ('you lost me at "loop" and "condition"', etc.), or not powerful enough to do the tasks that Retool isn't good at, without diving deep into the weeds, and you're not as good as Retool wrt the tasks that Retool excels at. Definitely cool that you can extend it with code, though I haven't parsed how that works. [*] https://scratch.mit.edu https://scratch.mit.edu
- frankgrecojr 3y agoI'd love to hear your feedback after taking a few minutes to try it out! We think this will be easy enough for non-developers to grok while also flexible enough for engineers to do whatever they want.
- mdekkers 3y agoLooks cool, but you lost me at the SSO Tax on your pricing page.
- eitally 3y agoI think "Scratch for business" is an excellent way to think about Superblocks. Like IFTTT or Zapier but with an orientation toward what the old promises of JBPM and similar used to make but could never deliver on. If you can empower non- & semi-technical business users to create workflow apps that will either create eliminate enormous headaches for IT.
- frankgrecojr 3y agoI agree. Today we help IT teams solve this with our integration level RBAC but there's a lot of interesting ideas brewing internally for this very problem.
- lstamour 3y ago
- simonbarker87 3y agoI love the idea of low code/no code for fast prototyping and experimentation. We use Zapier extensively for exactly that. Once the experiment is tweaked and considered a success, we port it to code. The problem comes in the middle phase, after until deployment and before turning it in to code: version control, debugging, collaboration etc is all a nightmare with no/code and so if any experiment gets too big it’s a real pain to deal with.
- frankgrecojr 3y agoI agree. We believe we've pulled off what hasn't been done before and solve the issues you mention. We're adding "step though debugging" (simple version is live today), version control (upcoming weeks), etc. to give an enterprise ready experience.
- pvg 3y agoDiscussed recently here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36495680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36495680
- frankgrecojr 3y agoThis is actually a completely separate feature! We're just iterating fast! Our AI launch introduced the ability to have AI generate and refactor code for you in our platform.
- pvg 3y agoRight but that's not really the cadence of Show HN which has its own weird rules.
- hk__2 3y agoI usually expect "Show HN" posts to be about new products/projects you’ve worked on, not to post every feature annoucement of your company. Also: > Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
- frankgrecojr 3y agoThanks for this! I personally wrote a significant portion of this feature am very excited about this new tech! Unfortunately we require email to signup but have a free trial. Users are able to test end to end in just a few clicks.
- cheschire 3y agoReminds me of SharePoint 2010 workflows, and eventually Apple's Shortcuts.
- vb-8448 3y agoSome questions: - can I self-host the whole suite without any internet connection? - Are you targeting retool users? - Are you targeting airflow users?
- frankgrecojr 3y agoWe provide an agent deployment model that allows your data to never leave your network. We do not however offer an air-gapped solution. Superblocks, Retool, and Airflow provide different approach to solve similar problems. We've found that lots of customers prefer Superblocks.
- vb-8448 3y ago> We provide an agent deployment model that allows your data to never leave your network I had i rapid look at the docs and, for what I understand, the agent is "dumb" and need to continuously contact your cloud (similar to github/gitlab ci runners) and also the user interface is on cloud. Correct?
- frankgrecojr 3y agoThe UI executes APIs against this agent which talks to Superblocks to fetch API definitions to run. These definitions will be "signed" by a key that only the agent is the authority of so customers can guarantee that it hasn't been tampered with.
- withinboredom 3y agoAll you are missing now is a 'scratch pad' to 'sketch out' an idea without any definites. Like take a nomnom/mermaidjs flow chart and let me 'flesh out' each block with the control blocks.
- frankgrecojr 3y agoEach one of these "APIs" has a json/yaml DSL that could be constructed with any builder pattern. We just haven't released a public API for this yet.
- cjohnson318 3y agoDoes this handle tasks in different timezones? Is there a map interface? Like, say I've got to manage multiple drivers over multiple timezones, and I need to know who's got an hour left on their shift, what they're hauling in their truck, and where they are on a map.
- frankgrecojr 3y agoSuperblocks can absolutely be used to build something to solve this use case.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> With Control Blocks, developers get a visual programming language that looks, feels, and scales like code. What problem does that solve? I get that there are situations when a programming medium that doesn’t look, feel, and scale like code might be useful, but when the right solution is something that looks, feels, and scales like code, isn't that what is solved by code?
- frankgrecojr 3y agoPerhaps. Those who want to do that can leverage our Javascript and Python blocks to write whatever code they'd like. Most of our platform is centered around "integrations". For example, You'd have a visual block for an S3 integration (that would have been previously configured) that you'd use rather than initializing an S3 client in code for example. We want to meet people where they're at though. If you want to write code, you can do that but if you want to use a more visual approach, you can do that as well.
- frankgrecojr 3y agoAnother way to maybe approach this is to consider programming constructs that are "hard" to understand. Imagine you want to "do n things in parallel". If your company uses Java (or any language where it's no trivial to do concurrency), this is not straight forward. A visual way to do this makes it much easier.
- dang 3y agoAs you had a successful Show HN a few months ago, it's probably too soon for another - see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36495680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36495680 - June 2023 (62 comments)
- frankgrecojr 3y agoOur of curiosity, which specific point does it violate? Would it help to remove the "Show HN: " prefix?
- pvg 3y agoProbably easier to think 'what's a thing to post that would be interesting to HN users' rather than 'what are the precise conditions for maximum posting frequency'. 'We're iterating very fast and have some new features' is usually not interesting enough to get around the 'about once a year for reposts in Show HN' standard. Of course, you can, as you point out, post outside Show HN but the same applies - the promotional effect has to be a consequence of interestingness so if you focus on interestingness, you get both and everyone wins.
- cheschire 3y agoAs an aside, where can one find all of the various rulesets? URL modification to tellhn.html or launchhn.html just resulted in 404's. I wonder if there's a lack of discoverability of HN rules for lots of folks or if I'm just too dense to personally figure it out. As I've never posted one of these topics myself, is there some process hijacking in place that will divert folks to the specific applicable rules when they preface their subject with specific keywords?
- dang 3y agoMy parent comment linked to the relevant one (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). It's also linked at the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show. The most important other links are https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, both of which are linked in the footer of every HN page.