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Good Overview of Modern Visual Application Builders?

19 points by golem14 ↗ HN
I'm looking for good pointers on visual application builder tools.

It's been a long while since I needed to build relatively simple apps, and much has since changed (cloud computing, webapps etc).

In the past, things like Borland Delphi were a good starting point. Recently, I played with Google App maker, which seems almost 100% perfectly suited to build simple, SQL backed applications. It's reasonably expandable with server side and client side snippets, has a decent number of widgets and a decent deployment framework too. The fly in the ointment is that AppMaker only works for users in the same Google GSuite domain, so I cannot use it for general app building.

I'm loathe to start dealing with UI details in code and really like a visual tool that helps me focus on application logic.

I appreciate any pointers to such application builders. Ideally, they are free/open source, work on a Mac or linux or don't have heavy license handicaps.

Thanks!

10 comments

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jonathanco
You could try looking at Microsoft PowerApps
golem14
Thanks, that looks worth checking out. But look at at the pricing chart, it looks like it's again limited to a business domain, not create apps that can then be launched at the world. Maybe I overlooked something. Any general app framework would require a robust and extensible auth framework.
haliax
Retool tryretool.com seems like it'd do the job
golem14
Looks great. Maybe a bit more rough than I'd love (e.g. tables look too much like spreadsheets), but seems pretty easy to get started with. I love the integration with Google Sheets as data sources ;)
frostymarvelous
If you're building internal facing apps, you can't go wrong with retool.

We've used it in production since before it became public and its served us well.

golem14
In addition to the comments below, I quickly looked at

* Bubble.is – UI looks great, but this is a full stack solution that requires hosting by them. * Lightning app builder – only runs on salesforce platform * Bobile – confused about this one, but it seems to focus on a special kind of sales mobile apps, and analytics.

* I _thought_ there were some UI building tools (ala balsamiq) that exported the UX into code.

Maybe I should just give up and deal with the FE UI directly in code. Even in GoogleAppMaker, code maintenance of larger deployments is not so easy. At least, it's easy to accidentally duplicate code, and hard to search and replace over all code snippets spread across all events and triggers.

bitdeveloper
Search for anvil.works. I never actually used it but the demo looked pretty cool, and it seemed pretty affordable.