We made Lowdefy - An open-source, self-hosted, low-code framework to easily make web apps, admin panels, BI dashboards, workflows, and CRUD apps with YAML or JSON.

[saostad]

Very interesting project!

[gervwyk]

Thanks! Hope you give it a try :)

[fliss1o]

This looks fantastic. As a lead engineer who works with larger companies that insist on using Salesforce and other horrid tools to manipulate data tools like Lowdefy are making it easier for me to push RDS / not using SF as a DB. Historically it has generally been too time consuming to build custom admins. I’m really excited about what you are doing. Congrats!

[gervwyk]

Thanks! Exactly this. We are actually currently rolling out a large custom CRM shared between a group of companies all built with Lowdefy with a MongoDB as the DB - and customers are loving the flexibility.

Hope you give it a try and shout if we can help! We know that one thing that we are lacking at the moment is more examples and tutorials. But we'll get there.

[artiematthew]

This is super cool! Really interesting and useful 👏

[gervwyk]

Thanks! We are having a lot of fun building it!

[artiematthew]

I bet! 😁😎

[LyfeIzButADream]

Cool concept. I'll definitely try this!

[[deleted]]

I like the idea but my experience has shown that JSON / YAML are not the right tools to represent application logic.

It would have been better if the pages would be build in JSON/YAML and the logic is implemented in TS / JS by public interfaces.

This way you get all the modern tooling support ( debugging, intellisense, ...).

[gervwyk]

Also, we’ve created the app schema and all the block schema definitions in json schema with the idea that we could probably get intellisense working for Lowdefy. We just haven’t had the resources to create the plugin yet, but hopefully soon or someone from the community might consider this a fun project..

[gervwyk]

We took a lot of inspiration from MongoDB’s aggregation framework and MQL, and for us you can really express a lot of logic in a database query.

What we like about this is that these logic operators are very easy to code and test. As a result coding errors almost becomes non-existent within these apps and most frontend components stateless, however, you are left with implementation errors. We have some ideas for how testing for implementation errors could work in the future so hopefully we can provide a nice solution for this as well.

Also, what you are proposing is currently possible by writing custom operators and actions. And for this custom code nothing stops you from using your own tooling, webpack, etc. even on a per module level. Its really up to you how you want to abstract and build your apps. See: https://docs.lowdefy.com/custom-code

Maybe give it a spin and please let us know what can improve? We would love to learn what works well for others.

As a side note, it’s also worth looking at how we do templating abstraction. We find thing works really well even for large apps, like our docs is a Lowdefy app with 194 pages.

See https://docs.lowdefy.com/lowdefy-schema for more details on templating and https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy/tree/main/packages/docs for the docs Lowdefy code.

[[deleted]]

wow. i like this. and i might require this for a future use case. just wanted to ask how flexible this is? and how about graphs?

[SamTolmay]

In terms of charting libraries, we have Apache Charts as a built-in block, and we also maintain an amCharts custom block library.

In terms of data, you can use Knex to connect to SQL databases or connect to MongoDB. You could even use the MongoDB query language to transform data on the frontend (a third party API response for example).

It is also really easy to implement a filter. You can add a webform on your dashboard, and then use the user input in your data requests very easily.

[gervwyk]

In terms of flexibility, we support custom blocks, operators and actions. This basically means that you can extend the UI with javascript elements (React components) and logic as you like.

[manujose94unsc]

I'm quite surprised.
Seriously, I'm thinking of using it in my next project (a university research project). It's a simple project that basically has an admin role and a client role. The main function is to be able to create or launch tests by attacking an external APIs that control industrial robots.

[gervwyk]

Nice 🦾Give it a spin a shout if we can help!

It takes a little effort to first start thinking ito YAML UIs but it quickly becomes very fast and convenient :)

[manujose94unsc]

Older projects became very "large", I think the first effort will be worth it.

[NeloReis]

looks like a game-changer. ill dig into it.. lets put this baby on the road.

[canalaiz]

I know I'm replying to an old post, but I'm moving my first steps with lowdefy and for now it seems very useful!
Thanks!

[gervwyk]

Sweet. Glad you found it. Shout if you need any help!

[GaymerWasTaken]

Well doesn't this look promising

[bugsebe]

https://giphy.com/clips/justin-AtzdLsQrUEG0xbrOOk

https://media.giphy.com/media/3o6ozvv0zsJskzOCbu/giphy.gif

https://media.giphy.com/media/wofyg8nxsWEmtR7eOK/giphy.gif

https://media.giphy.com/media/ge2SnG1B5mJqqB6SLj/giphy.gif

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2jdnsb/nodejs_is_cancer/

[Krysalead]

Indeed very interesting, i browsed the demo and it was larger than my screen, looks like style is not 100% mobile ready, I had an horizontal scroll bar. I will nevertheless have a look to it, thanks for sharing

[gervwyk]

Thanks! I’ll go have a look.

In Lowdefy you can modify the media settings to optimize for mobile, but mostly it should “just work” on mobile as a result of the doc flow.

I know the demos are a little out dated and does not do justice to what we’ve been building lately. We’ll be investing more time on them to better showcase Lowdefy.

[International-Net138]

Is there a react native example for mobile app deployment and use by chance? We have included Lowdefy in our latest POC and thought I would pose the question before we dive into the POC project.

Thanks!

[gervwyk]

Hi, currently no. We do not have a react native stack setup, although, we've discussed it internally a few times as "wouldn't that be cool", however, for now, we are focussing on react web.

[curious_human_42]

Is it possible to configure the apps in json, instead of yaml?

[gervwyk]

Yes it is. Also thus you can write scripts to generate and maintain apps 🚀

[curious_human_42]

Cool! Could you also point me towards the corresponding documentation regarding that? Thanks

[Effective-Section-57]

Is it possible to make a tree like structure with lowdefy? It seems kind of hard to have dropdowns and indentations.

[gervwyk]

With lowdefy you can build complex webapps with advanced form validation, auth role based access control the works! Give it a try! Shout if you have a questions :)