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Ask HN: Easiest way to create a CRUD web app in 2024?

34 points by samuell ↗ HN
Is there a framework or solution that enables to create simple CRUD apps without a lot of duplicated development both on the back-end and front-end sides?

Something that can generate a functioning app based on just a model, or similar?

33 comments

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rozenmd
Not that I use it, but that sounds like the promise of Ruby on Rails?
t312227
afaik ...

without using a search engine - so i cant say "lmgt4u" - the following ones come to my mind:

* python with for example django

* php with for example laravel

* ruby with rails (2nd this ... not that i ever used it ;)

* java with for example spring-boot

* javascript/node.js with some crappy lib i can't remember right now

* ...

just my 0.02€

samuell
Yeah, I guess I thought there might be some revolutionary new framework that simplifies it beyond these frameworks. I have been playing with Django, and seen some Laravel code, and it is Ok, but still quite the effort to get something simple up
MatthiasPortzel
I’ve used Django, Next.js, and Ruby on Rails for CRUD apps recently (in 2023). If you want to minimize time spent writing boilerplate, Rails is still your best bet.
samuell
Great to know! I have liked Django in many ways when playing with it, but it is quite the boilerplate to write. Feels like you basically repeat yourself three times, with the MVC split setup. Feels like some of that should be possible to auto-generate, at least with defaults.
vhcr
The one you have the most experience with.
vasili111
I have heard about Appsmith but never used it myself. Anybody have used Appsmith for this purpose and can share personal experience?
speedgoose
It’s fine for quick prototyping and internal applications.
vasili111
What you do not like in it? Can you suggest better alternatives?
speedgoose
I haven’t used it for a while as I stopped using low code tools since ChatGPT’s release, but I remember:

- the final application is a bit slow to load, there is a lot of code.

- it uses mongodb internally. I don’t like having mongodb on my stacks.

- the docker and kubernetes deployments were not following best practices. They ran everything, even mongodb and redis, in a stateful container with a process manager inside the container.

- version controlling the apps wasn’t trivial.

- some features weren’t open source so I had to quickly hack them again.

I found retool, proprietary, to be better if you can afford it.

mgummelt
How do you use ChatGPT to write CRUD apps? Do you mean Github Copilot?
speedgoose
I use them both. I use ChatGPT to do the big parts like the SQL schema and some boilerplate. It works better in Python with fastAPI than Rust with Axum though.
mgummelt
Cool. How do you use it to generate the frontend CRUD interfaces?
speedgoose
I go with React and use GitHub copilot more but ChatGPT can do the big or more advanced components. It’s a lot of manual work still.
samuell
Thanks, I'll check it out!
foxbee
Budibase is great at generating CRUD apps based on a model.

https://budibase.com/

samuell
This looks super interesting, thanks!
foxbee
It's particularly focused on CRUD apps, SQL and Rest.
atmosx
Rails features Turbo, background jobs libraries, mailers, etc. It's like 90% of what you need is _already there_ you just have to use it.
mgummelt
It depends what you mean by CRUD app.

Strictly speaking, the answer to your question is Airtable.

samsin
Have you looked at .NET MVC with Blazor? It might be overkill for your needs, but the templates give you a good starting point to avoid the usual boilerplate.
austin-cheney
I have some prebuilt tools in vanilla JavaScript. I just copy/paste what I need from my tools and use WebSockets. I can be up within 90 minutes with everything tested and have a large web app that fully loads around 800ms cold and as fast as 130ms in Chrome. Then the next day is content, database (optional), and finally event test automation in the browser.
ozmennico
There is a React meta-framework named Refine for building CRUD apps like internal tools, admin panels etc.

However it's only for frontend.

Check out the CRUD app templates with source codes. https://refine.dev/templates/

ttymck
Django and its built in admin panel is still so impressive to me. Adding react admin would be a logical extension of that for a more flexible frontend.
adius
We're trying to build this with https://www.airsequel.com.

So far it generates the whole backend from the SQLite database schema and we'll include an automatic webapp generator soon.

tristenharr
Hi! 100% Hasura is what you need! This is our calling card, I work for Hasura and if you need instant CRUD on your database, new or existing you can’t go wrong with Hasura.

It’s kind of like PostGrest with GraphQL.

It does exactly what you want, you have a database with models and it gives you endpoints for CRUD in GraphQL and you can RESTify any GraphQL to make it into a REST endpoint as well.

It does it by introspecting the database then generating a schema, and the OSS GraphQL-engine that runs Hasura compiles the GraphQL directly to SQL.