HN Explorer

Ask HN: What are the best modern frameworks for quickly generating MVPs?

4 points by ItsMattyG ↗ HN
I know it sounds crazy, but I used to build my MVPs in Drupal. The reason for this was that I could build my data model (objects, fields, relationships, etc.), and then Drupal would automatically generate a themable frontend for viewing items, creating them with forms, and navigating/searching lists using the views module. An older framework that has this sort of functionality is Ruby on Rails.

A more modern framework that seems to have this sort of automatic UI generation from a data model is VulcanJS, but it's not clear to me if there's still an active community/active development(mostly when searching I find articles and discussion from one or two years ago).

HN, is there a modern framework with a large community that can quickly generate UIs for creating, reading, updating, and deleting content after creating the data model?

8 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] thread
icedchai
Why is it crazy? You used something that works!
ItsMattyG
I recently tried this again, and realized how awful Drupal is in most other respects.
rman666
Ruby on Rails, bro!
verdverm
If you want to use html templates server side. As soon as someone wants a modern client framework, this rails falls short. Unless there is something I'm missing, please correct me if I'm wrong.
ItsMattyG
Yes, rails is great, but would love more of the direction of a single page app. VulcanJS is closest but like I said not sure if its' still that active.
verdverm
I might have something you'd be interested in, still in beta.

https://hofstadter.io (checkout the docs)

ItsMattyG
Looks like a good start! If it helps, here's two things I would need to switch over:

1. Theming/Components so I can make it look good enough that alpha testers don't immediately write it off (A decent looking material design theme with customizable colors would be fine).

2. The pricing model is a non-starter with the current project, which requires us to create dozens of MVPs a year, and move forward with the ones that resonate with customers

amirouche
In JavaScript I don't know. In Python, there is still django-admin and a similar library for Flask. Generating the frontend is another story.

> VulcanJS, but it's not clear to me if there's still an active community/active development

DIY!