[nell]

I will be happy to use a no-code platforms that lets me eject out into a standard application. Otherwise, I'm just learning and depending on a proprietary system.

Once you need something slightly complex, no-code becomes non-trivial. It requires serious commitment to learn all the techniques the designers came up with.

So most people who use these tools use them for for simple or short-lived apps and side projects, which they could now use web frameworks, but just want to try something new, because they know it's trivial.

[redbell]

> Once you need something slightly complex, no-code becomes non-trivial.

IMHO, this holds true if we replace “no-code” with “AI code generation”.

[jabits]

Maybe, except folks have been trying to get no-code working for literally decades; AI code gen is new and still learning…

[PKop]

Which means it is even further from viable than no-code and it is more vaporware, and less proven.

[mohanarpit]

Completely agree. No code is great for simple CRUD apps but unfortunately, anything reasonably complex requires code. This is why we ended up building Appsmith which is an open source "low code" application builder. You can write custom JS code across the board & customize your application to build more complex apps. Makes getting started easy but also keeps you going for a long time.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Appsmith.

[v3ss0n]

Then why build nocode platform? Just build frame work with components

[mohanarpit]

Because a framework with components is just basic UI building blocks. There's a lot more that goes in building a full-fledged app. Layouts, page design, dynamic data, business logic etc. A low code builder like Appsmith helps devs orchestrate all of this much more easily.

[duxup]

Do any allow ejecting?

I would assume exposing their spaghetti that comes with such a platform is a big concern.

Let alone managing bringing things back in after someone gets creative.

[bcoates]

I've used WYSIWYG UI dialog editors (mostly the one MSVS used to bundle with C# in... I wanna say 2012?) that maintain their entire state as somewhat-editible two-way code (so if I modified the code, at least within a constrained envelope, it would be reflected in the editor and remain WYSIWYG editable).

Does that count?

If so, I think the lesson is you need to keep the no-code side way, way less ambitious than is theoretically possible in order to keep everyone sane and you might actually have a useful tool that doesn't dig you into a big hole.

[SCUSKU]

Definitely agree with you in terms of limiting functionality built on top of WYSIWYG UIs. 2 years ago I developed a non-trivial app using Retool and it became an unmaintainable spaghetti monster "code" base. (Side note: Retool was pretty solid, my application was just way too complex for it)

The result was I wasted 6 weeks of time when I should've just spent 2-3 days prototyping and then throw out the tool once I had a good idea of what we actually wanted. In the end if didn't matter since the project died anyways :/

[cuffe]

PM at Retool, agreed this is hard problem. Like you said, most projects fail so Retool can help you validate and get to success or failure faster. But yeah totally agree that performance, making diffs cleaner, and code search are some things we’re really working on.

[monknomo]

Yeah, I had similar experience with https://eclipse.dev/windowbuilder/ in java swing. You can use the drag and drop for most of it, and if you need to hand edit some code, it mostly works and is reflected in the gui tool.

I thought it was pretty productive and honestly sort of miss that kind of development

[duxup]

That counts to me. Very interesting.

[jtwaleson]

Mendix does allow this. It runs on JVM containers so from their own "action blocks" you can just say "Call Java action" and execute your code there. There is a java api that you can access from there. Pretty neat and that's how most plugins are built.

On the client side you can do something similar with javascript.

[antran22]

I worked with some platforms that does. However, those usually position themselves as a code generator more than a full application builder.

- Amplication: Last I checked, they allow defining data structure & endpoints etc. before exporting to Nest.js Boilerplate with niceties. They sync to a separate branch on GitHub, so you can use it alongside writing actual logic into the boilerplate, and merge new changes from Amplication to the main branch. - Draftbit (React Native based Mobile App builder). The builder is not very great, they lack a bunch of features. They make up for this by allowing the developer to add custom JS code very easily. You can write your own Custom React element inside the editor, and with a little massaging things can fall into place. I'm not saying this approach should be abused, though. The team told us once that some of their big clients are mobile dev agencies that mostly just use the platform to Storyboard & bootstrap some UI before doing the actual logic in their own code. - FlutterFlow (Mobile App builder). I'm biased because I'm still in the progress of helping a client fixing their mess on FlutterFlow. FlutterFlow's code output is really spaghetti. The developer UX on the builder is horrible, so in the end I still opt to eject and deal with the spaghetti code.

[toomuchtodo]

If your workflows are exposed to their UI using an API, you can get your workflows out.

Whether it’s worth it vs rebuilding them bespoke is a different question. Or you have to have an ETL layer between your SaaS vendor and whatever open source workflow runner you’d eject to.

[IggleSniggle]

There are some open source data flow languages that are really just GUIs for code expressed in text that is run through an interpreter.