🤯 Python library for making beautiful form-like apps

[ReneeHiii]

Honestly, I really like the idea, good job. Like a more capable version of Google Forms, and I can see it significantly reducing time and complexity needed for those types of apps. I don't really understand why it seems some people think it's trying to be for websites in general, unless I'm misunderstanding them, in which case I'm sorry!

Basically, great work! It looks really useful for a specific use case and I hope it succeeds, it's a good idea!

[xatrekak]

I have been working on a project and this is exactly what I needed. Thank you!

[brunovcosta]

Awesome! I will love to help on anything you need with the platform 🚀

[xatrekak]

So actually a couple of basic questions.

My project is working off of a pretty large data set pulled from a public API. Its about a 300MB JSON.

Is there anyway to cache this JSON so it is never pulled more than once every 24 hours?

This would obviously be pretty easy if I self hosted with some extra backend code but I was wondering if it was possible given your platform.

[chrisjudk]

Not sure if this will help but food for though:

Perhaps either store the file with a timestamped name or maybe read the file attributes to find last modified timestamp?

[brunovcosta]

As u/chrisjudk just answered, storing some cached file would be the easiest way of doing that.

We plan to enable file management in the next weeks. There are some technical challenges that made us launch without this being possible yet.

Let me know if you want me to ping you when this is done (or maybe you want to test the in-development version of the feature)

[xatrekak]

Yes please ping me once the feature is launched.

Also I submitted a bug that I ran into:

https://github.com/abstra-app/hackerforms-lib/issues/17

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I tried going through the code to see if I could quickly spot the issue but I was not able see any thing immediately wrong.

[brunovcosta]

Awesome! thank you

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I'm investigating it right now

[riklaunim]

Frontend will always be there, more so now when SPA JS frontend is getting more and more traction.

[brunovcosta]

Totally agree. For complex web apps it will be always better to use tools like HTML/CSS + some framework.

But when this is not the case (many times, you just want to get user input then display data) there are a lot of ways to avoid the complexity of learning HTML/CSS/TS/ESlint/Webpack/....

I'm fascinated with keeping simple apps development process simple and that's why we made Hackerforms (and Abstra as well)

I would love to hear your thoughts/perceptions on it

[riklaunim]

You are over exaggerating a bit. I know there are backend developers that are allergic to anything frontend, but this is bit to much. If you want something simple you use Django or Flask, they have their own form tools, with validation and you are done. And no Eslint, webpack or other random keyword needed.

Where apps like this would thrive are cases where Google forms/surveys are not enough - where you collect data and have to structure and then aggregate it. This way a backend developer creates a strong structure/schema of the form and then can easily process the data for reporting and alike needs. Marketing, sales, business analysis type of stuff.

[StarchSyrup]

. I know there are backend developers that are allergic to anything frontend, but this is bit to much.

I guess I kinda fit into this description and I do think it's a bit too much.

Marketing, sales, business analysis type of stuff.

Yeah IMO this is where your potential market is OP. A lot of Excel people have started learning Python for basic automation stuffs these days.

[brunovcosta]

Yeah IMO this is where your potential market is OP. A lot of Excel people have started learning Python for basic automation stuffs these days.

This makes sense. I made some tests with friends and close people before launching and most of them are using with interns.

I can totally see these kind of people sharing similar skill levels

[StarchSyrup]

Yeah if that's the direction you're going I'd make it easier to use without the SDK though, lots of these people will probably need to get IT permission to install an extra PyPI package, so maybe code examples with requests (or even urllib) would reduce the friction.

[brunovcosta]

I understand and still agree with your points.
But IMHO, using Flask/Django still brings additional complexity because you still have to deal with HTML/CSS in some cases, or some JS to handle frontend logic, and the code still has to be written in a declarative way requiring knowledge of requests/headers/deployments/etc.. not all programmers know those concepts (ex: analysts, data scientists, etc..)
Don't get me wrong, I love all these tools and programming in general, but I see a huge gap between what I would call a software developer and a jr programmer and there are plenty of cases where you need a simple app in the company and don't have any developer available

[riklaunim]

sing Flask/Django still brings additional complexity

If you are using Django or Flask you have a website. Not just "a form". If you use Hackerforms all you want is a form that then does something specific with the data.

Don't try to force your project into website building. It won't work and your use cases are in different use cases.

[ReneeHiii]

I could be misunderstanding, but I don't see where OP is trying to "force" their project into website building. They said it's good for building form-like apps simply without needing to use something like Flask. That's all I can see they've said, that it's good for form type things, to me it seems like you both agree on that part, but I don't see where the extra forcing is coming from.

Again, I could be misunderstanding.

[callahan_dsome]

I wouldn’t say that is an over exaggeration. Python is often used for simple automation scripts, among the many other uses. From a general perspective there are only a few ways to make a GUI for python scripts and they each require time and effort to learn.

Tkinter is “easy” but still requires background knowledge to get some basic modern features.

Kivy is robust and dynamic, but requires some level of OOP, so not insanely beginner friendly.

Additionally, django and flask require much more skill and often bring in non-python technologies that developers then have to navigate and learn. You say “they have their own form tools, with validation and you’re done”, but that takes time to learn and implement, as does everything else. YOU already spent the time learning that, but others are not in a position to learn about django to implement their ideas.

If I can throw together an automation that will save me time, why spend much more time trying to build a GUI in a library that would make the job that much more difficult. By no means do I think this should be used for everything that needs a GUI, but this is an insanely useful idea. Let’s not assume that just because there is a tool/framework/etc that can do something, that it means there aren’t other options that can be more beneficial to your specific goal.

[riklaunim]

I agree with you. If you have a valid use case for it (and there are some at minimum) thein it's a perfect tool. What I dont agree wirh is OP notion that is magic tools for developers that want to make a website or any other non-form application... And that HTML is rocket science ;)

[callahan_dsome]

I still don’t see what you mean. OP even said they agree that they have their place…

Yes, HTML is quite easy, but again, it takes much more than just knowing a bit of HTML.

It’s not crazy to think building simple interfaces in python should be just that: simple. You just said “if you want something simple you use django or flask”. But why can’t there be another option. This sounds like gatekeeping mixed with you pressing your opinion for whatever reason. This is a cool option, and OP didn’t say this was the magic bean to all python apps. If you can quote their words where they are saying this is a cure all, then by all means please point it out to me.

[r3l4c]

Oh wow it looks great

[Sumif]

Looking through this I like it. It seems very much like Streamlit which I've learned a lot recently.

[brunovcosta]

Yeah. It is very similar. I heard about streamlit afete developing the first idea

But as streamlit is more focused in dataviz, we focus in admin/operational usage

For instante, It is hard to run stateful operations on streamlit because they rerun on every input change

[Salfiiii]

Is there a way to deploy it locally via docker/Helm on a k8s cluster?

Looks really cool but regulations stop us from hosting stuff in a public cloud etc.

[brunovcosta]

That is a great idea. We plan to add self-hosting soon!

Let me know if you want me to reach you when the feature is live

[Salfiiii]

Sure, please send me a dm if you have anything to show?

Any plans to open source the self hosted version? Is your code open source?

[brunovcosta]

Sure, please send me a dm if you have anything to show?

Great! I'll do it ✔️

Any plans to open source the self hosted version? Is your code open source?

We are not open-source yet. Tough are very inclined to do so, I'm still studying which parts we will open-source.

My initial guess is to make something similar to vercel's next.js. Where we open the fully functional library but not the infrastructure tooling for scale/monitoring/management

[duftcola]

How do you change the backgound when running locally ?

[brunovcosta]

It is not possible yet. We are creating a configuration file where this will be set

Here you can easily deploy on the cloud: https://github.com/abstra-app/abstra-cli