Comment by meredydd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meredydd | Hacker News Reader

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> I've seen no evidence to support the suggestion that building CRUD apps for the web takes 5x as long as with something like PowerBuilder, Delphi, VB etc

Well, I have!

We actually did the test, with Anvil (https://anvil.works), which is explicitly a VB/Delphi-like platform for the web.

We took a straightforward CRUD-y consulting project as a spec, and built it with traditional tools and with Anvil. We did our best to keep it fair: We raced an expert against an expert, and we kept the web tech simple: simple templating, minimal JS, etc. And it was still about 7 times faster with the Delphi-like tool.

(It was actually 10x faster if you just count dev time, but we counted overhead meetings too - again, in an effort to be fair. It was still "one week" vs "one afternoon".)

Similarly, many report that Dot-Net Web Forms development is usually quicker than MVC for in-house software (that doesn't need eye-candy) under normal circumstances[1], but developers don't want to use it because they are told it's "outdated" and it will rot their skill-set.

[1] As suggested earlier, if the MVC stack is well-managed this may not be the case, but the average company has average management, by definition.

Huh? You don't see the irony in using a web toolkit as an example of how you can be more productive NOT using the web? Anvil is a VB/Delphi-like platform for the web, it even transpiles python down to JS in order to run in the browser. You're proving my own point for me. The web is so versatile that it gives you the power to do whatever you want, including clone a Delphi form builder in the browser. How is that an argument against the web?

I'm skeptical such a tool can stand the test of time per browser changes. A code base may work this year, but not in 5. A dedicated CRUD-friendly GUI standard would likely be well-tested on CRUD because that's its main job, not cat videos nor Amazon product lists.

You might want to mention that you are an anvil cofounder. Doesn't invalidate your point, but it looks a little disingenuous.

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