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Comment by justintocci | Hacker News Reader

We are happy to announce the release of Envelope v1.0.0 today.

Envelope is a complete platform that makes building web apps on top of PostgreSQL easy.

Envelope is free, open source, offered under a PostgreSQL style license, compatible with modern and mobile browsers, production ready and available today at envelope.xyz.

All you need to know is SQL, and some HTML and you can publish your database as a web application with Envelope!

Envelope source code is available on Github but free installers are available for Mac, Linux and FreeBSD. Visit envelope.xyz and click on "Install" to get your copy.

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> All you need to know is SQL, and some HTML

So it's a reimagined ColdFusion? :-)

I admit, I don't use CF.

I looked at the Wikipedia entry for it and I see its heavy on server side programming. Envelope replaces server side programming.

CF uses server side programming to make components whereas Envelope uses Javascript web components on the client side.

Their seems to be a lot of overlap in expected use cases. Internal apps, data-driven apps.

I apologize, I can't really assert much else do to lack of experience with CF.

Aside from implementation details, I think the premise is the same: simple data access using SQL and rendering using familiar HTML-like syntax for markup and logic. CF of course came about at a time when browsers were far less capable (1995), so rendering is of course on server. Additionally, I think CF probably has more middleware, but I really haven't given Envelope much of a look (you really need a standard docs page)

Check out the live demo. The docs are very extensive, but they work best inside the IDE.

Having worked on CF, it's not as bad as people made it out to be.

I actually worked with CF most of my career, spoke at some CF conferences, and still run the Houston CF user group. Don't use it as much as I used to (moved mostly to Rails for the ecosystem), but it's still a very capable language.

As someone who is still, 17 years later, running a large-ish production CF site on a daily basis, and still teaching new hires and interns to use CF every summer, I'm happy to see a little (!) CF love on HN.

I've built production apps in Rails, PHP, and CF, and I've tinkered with Go, Python, etc. I still haven't found a language that gets interns from "don't know HTML" to "working dynamic web thing" faster than ColdFusion.

The installers cannot be downloaded because when I click the buttons I get this: {"stat": false, "dat": {"error": "canonical_read_file failed"}}

People are trying to download from the old link. Please refresh the install page to get the latest link.

fixed! Thank you!

> Envelope is a complete platform that makes building web apps on top of PostgreSQL easy.

Easy when it is a simple CRUD app? When does 'easy' stop and the real work begin?

>...production ready and available today...

What are some production apps that have been built with this tool?

>All you need to know is SQL, and some HTML and you can publish your database as a web application with Envelope!

Is that all? Again, is this just for a simple CRUD app? If not, then for a substantial application, what do you mean by "some HTML"?

What are the real world uses for this? I didn't really get a clear picture of that from your web site.

Edit: These questions sounded a bit snarky. Not my intention. If I had a better idea of what this was actually used for it would help.

>...production ready and available today...

Envelope has been in production for six years. Apps in production: Foreign stocking location (barcode inventory app), Jmine (Export of a Goldmine database published to the web), all our internal apps (Address Book, Calendar, Wiki), JType (export of Suntype published to the web, Suntype is a DOS-based newspaper accounting app). Workflow Products, LLC has used Envelope for all its customers for years now.

> (SQL and HTML) Is that all? Again, is this just for a simple CRUD app?

I've worked with MS Access for many years and never wrote my own widget. Envelope is designed for these types of apps. You can build simple apps with no Javascript. You can easily build very full featured apps with a little Javascript but you don't need to write any widgets or extend the platform to do so.

Ok, thanks. That makes much more sense now.

> When does 'easy' stop and the real work begin?

Envelope includes the Greyspots framework which is a collection of web components that talk to PostgreSQL through the Envelope server. These web components give you all the standard widgets that you would use to put together a normal database app. For example, all the components that MS Access provides, Greyspots framework provides. Many app developers will never need to write their own widgets, but for those who do need something unique, you can copy the closest Greyspots widget (its just a Javascript web component) and hack it into whatever you need. Then you just use it in your HTML via <my-component>. More info on Web Components: webcomponents.org

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