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Comment by spmurrayzzz | Hacker News Reader

I attempted to use this a few months ago to prototype a unified ticketing solution (just an experiment to see if it would be worth adopting for small internal apps) using pre-existing mongo data. Seems super early to use this for anything serious in my view.

TL;DR - It ended up being orders of magnitude faster for me to just build it from scratch.

One of the biggest general UX issues I encountered was how data sources & queries are defined in the UI, and then how they're bound in the WSYWIG editor. It wasn't immediately obvious and the docs are pretty lean. In most cases, I'd just prefer a config file vs doing everything via the UI.

I like the idea and how flexible it aims to be generally, but its in very early stages right now.

(Small aside: There was also a showstopper mongo bug as well that would have prevented me from moving forward with the tool even if I liked it. It was a simple async issue, 11 line diff to fix, but took months to merge.)

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Check out Lowdefy - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

It is open source, self hosted and you write your apps in config (yaml / json). So your are not trapped in a UI, you are free to copy paste find and replace and you can version control as you like. Also, we use it extensively with mongo.

Shameless plug. Cofounder of Lowdefy

Thanks! Just looked through the docs, looks very well thought out.

I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that no/low-code tooling rarely ever works out in my org (mostly because its hard to make a generic framework to encompass what we like to do with internal tooling) — but will absolutely check this out and provide some feedback if I think I have something useful to contribute.

Cheers.

Hi, thanks for the feedback, sorry to hear you had some problems.

The Mongo connector in general could probably do with some love - there's a few features in mongo such as projections that budibase does not support. We'd love to know more about what you were trying to build and how we could help you achieve it.

We move quickly, however, and the platform has come a long way in even a few months. We hope you try the platform again soon and continue to provide feedback as to where it could be improved.

Docs are a big focus for us over the coming months and they will see significant improvement in short order.

Thanks again!

I'd be happy to help out on the mongo side if you'd like. Maybe some github issues with a related label to help triage those issues would be helpful for folks to lend a hand.

I'll concede that no/low-code solutions have never historically worked out at my organization (context: I am cofounder and director of engineering at a wireless ISP). Theres always a set of tradeoffs that make it really hard to deliver value when you're dealing with business domain constraints that are hard to generalize.

That said, I am always willing to give things a fair shot and have a long list of small use cases that I use for prototyping when I go down that rabbit hole.

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