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Comment by mmonihan | Hacker News Reader

OP. This is an idea I've been going back and forth on for a while.

I have checked out Quickbase, Airtable, Ragic, etc.

What I've noticed is that I always want the ability to go to code when I need to. My clients are all on Rails apps today, and I'm happy with rails as a dev solution. And, I don't want to give up that flexibility.

However, there are use cases where I want to just use a form builder UI to manage a data model. I've been using http://form.io for that recently. You use a form builder to generate a UI and an API simultaneously and submissions are stored in Mongo. And, I can build the app as I want using their API.

I think that paradigm is the future, it just needs more refinement.

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Ah alright - so definitely more aimed at people who can code. Ours was more focused at end-users.

That is one area where Salesforce shines. APEX and Visualforce can get you just about anything you may need for customizations. I'm sure something similar will pop up, but then people will complain about having to sell your soul to them, too :)

Workato is another nice tool to augment Quickbase & Airtable. It's like Zapier, but allows you to add some code (Ruby in fact) to do custom hooks.

I guess it really depends on how complex you need to go, which then brings me to my point about being master-of-none - at that point you're losing your abstraction and essentially building a custom app.

Salesforce is a great solution for stupid CRUD apps that require some custom code here or there. A year ago I started with 8 users, now I'm at 40 and counting - I don't have to waste time developing a front-to-back web application to keep track of garbage that was stored in spreadsheets, and my users get rapid turnaround on most changes (hey, add this new object or field please!).

And if your users don't need to access a lot of different "types" of data (objects) the $25/mo "App Cloud" license is a cheap way to get going.

Zapier has custom Code steps (Javascript & Python):

https://zapier.com/help/code/

https://zapier.com/help/code-python/

For quick CRUD apps, where a spreadsheet is your admin panel I recommend Sheetsu.com (I'm founder). You get REST API, from your spreadsheet. What you do with it is up to you.

We see a huge peak with agencies and freelancers using our service, just to avoid building admin panels for a client. Easy, clean & simple.

I posted upthread already, but I would really love to know what you think of Anvil (https://anvil.works).

We're aiming squarely at your use case: more than just a form builder; less fuss than fighting Heroku for four hours.

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