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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Have you considered Power Apps model-driven apps[1]? You may not be interested in a PaaS solution however it is very easy to create a CRUD app from a model!
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.
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.
