Heads up for the creator: putting everything under ugliest.app allows pages to read the same cookies across different "apps". If anyone plans to use the platform for production (which you appear to welcome), nothing substantial can be done.
I forgot what made github.com switch to github.io. Something similar but totally separate.
There's also the added benefit of being able to list the github.io domain on the Public Suffix List [1], which means that no cookies can be set for the top level domain, only the *.github.io subdomains. This prevents the platform users from accidentally revealing their cookies to every other app under the top level domain.
EDIT: to ellaborate for the interested, the Public Suffix List is used by browser vendors to decide what part of the URL is considered the TLD for display and cookie security purposes (and I imagine others).
Jokes aside though, I think there's a real use-case for something like this: Small multi-user CRUD apps, most often for a confined audience that don't warrant whipping up some kind of web server software and deploying it to a VM or a lambda function or whatever. Just create some tables, write some markup and you're done. Share the URL, it's live!
You could also use it for stuff like simple form submissions in otherwise static sites (à la Netlify) or website hosting in general. Just have your static site generator spit out an ugliest.app bundle and deploy it using curl. You get some dynamic content generation for free!
Hopefully this does not sound insane but I think this idea of "something like Access, kind of, but on the web" is brilliant and necessary. I don't wanna tell you what to do but maybe open sourcing this would be beneficial? Judging by how fast you've been fixing bugs and adding features in the comments I figure the code is not a mess. People might just prefer contributing that one feature they were missing instead of writing their own web server for their tiny app.
I do a little tech consulting on the side (mostly web dev, but sometimes just regular "IT stuff" too)...and I've had clients who i know would be a pain if i conduct the usual process for developing an app/website for them...and often (to save myself from headaches) try to look for a solution for them that is something like Access (or super Excel) but for the web...and haven't found one that is nicely balanced yet. This kind of thing - if it evolves a little more on the ugliness side - might eventually fit the bill. (To clarify: i have no care about the ugly aspect, but the same annoying clients who would benefit from this paradigm are the same ones who criticize apps because they're not "pretty enough"...So, there's that to consider.)
Exactly! As for the visual aspect, you can do whatever you want on your own pages. Just the handful of pages that make the editor are "ugly" (unless you can smuggle something like a user stylesheet into your client's browser). The question is if your client would use the editor themselves in the first place. It's not rocket science but that templating language might be a bit more daunting to a general audience than Access.
I have noticed AirTable but I've never tried it. Maybe it's good but on the spectrum of customization AirTable seems closer to Excel or Google Sheets than Access or something custom-made.
Another important aspect is data protection. For my last "just CRUD" project I had to implement at-rest encryption where PII is only accessible with the user's password[1]. Something like that would be possible in JavaScript in an ugliest.app but if I'm not mistaken not in AirTable. Most businesses would probably be fine with it but I'm always a bit uncomfortable entrusting someone else with any unencrypted customer data, especially PII. (But I'm not saying AirTable doesn't do its job protecting customer data.)
Dang. It's really hard to put something online that lets anybody be creative without someone coming in, using to do bad things, and getting the whole site blocked by google.
I guess nothing is going to change too since this conveniently serves to entrench the big platforms.
I mean, the ultimate "fake it till you make it" power move would be to go straight to the "Our Incredible Story" acquisition/aquihire claim on your homepage linking straight to a Google Graveyard project, right?
(Then start posting on your LinkedIn about your new "career" hand building replica Inuit whalebone and sealskin canoes using traditional methods...)
This is cool, but it seems to be broken. I tried to create a table called `test`, but I got `something went wrong but we won't say what`. It's also not clear to me what to do with a table (I don't see any options to add columns or data).
EDIT: Maybe it's just being hugged to death. Just about every action is throwing the aforementioned error now.
EDIT2: This would be really cool if it were self-hosted (obviously without the auto-deletion)!
It’s a shame you’ve chosen to delete everything after 24 hours. I understand why though. Maybe just make no guarantee that the apps will stay live, so I can share what I make with friends?
I like the plain design, very austere and to the point. It would be good if your copy was just as blunt and frank, tell us why it’s good and why we should use it
I love this, but it doesn't look like server-side language is Turing complete. It can only read, write, and delete rows; branches on admin; and returns a random number. Is it possible to extend the language in a way defining functions, if stmt and for loops are possible?
Since it already has if, I wonder if I can branch on things other than "admin".
EDIT: I stand corrected, looks like using `range .. end` you can actually loop.
EDIT2: if also works:
{{ if (rando 0 1) }}
a
{{ else }}
b
{{ end }}
prints a or b non deterministically.
EDIT3: I wish it supported operations like equality, addition, <, > etc
Awesome! I wish all functions were documented. Is this a programming language that I can google by name? I intentionally created some errors and googled the error messages but didn't find anything. Is this a homebaked PL?
Nothing about the word "application," even when looking only at definitions related to computer software, suggests a particular platform, architecture, language, etc.
We qualify with "native" when we want to say that a given app was written specifically to execute on a certain system rather than on many systems as made possible by emulation, virtualization, web browsers, etc. so I would agree if this claimed to make ugly native apps.
Reminds me of expages.com from back in the 90s. Creating a website was simple. The "login" page to create an expage was the same as the sign up, so you could easily create new websites on the expage.com domain.
My friends and I built huge networks of Expage websites. Even the popular kids in school made their own sites. Being linked to by certain people was a big deal.
I credit Expage as being one of the main reasons I got into software development.
Is the source code public? If not, do you have plans to make it open-source? I'm impressed at how fast you've been able to fix bugs and implement new features and I'd like to see how it works :)
Not sure what's ugly about it: it looks nicer and cleaner than most of the websites I see. I'm also not quite sure what's an "app platform", but this seems to be some sort of a web publishing service, and there's a bug on page creation: it leads to a 404 error page (possibly it requires JS, but doesn't say so, and works without it otherwise).
Edit: Noticed the docs page [1]. There's some scripting, so the uploaded pages are rather PHP-style scripts/apps, hence the "app platform", probably. Might be useful to link the documentation from the main page.
Hmm this is useless and wonderful at the same time. Problem is, I'm a writer, not a developer. Can anyone link to a sample app that a development deprived luddite like me can digest?
Hi, it periodically got hugged to death and this. Assuming the creator wasn't monitoring all server traffic as part of their outreach campaign, flippant messages like mine can help to show the reality of people being bounced quickly and fix their server infrastructure or code.
Flippant messages like yours do not provide any value and do not help any more than ”Seems like it was hugged to death”. Pretty much anything that is not protected by ”cloudflare & co” will be hugged to death by HN
Warning: May contain sound
Edit: Accidentally left the token on the URL I posted and got pwned... :)