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Comment by kyllo | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with CRUD apps?

Has CRUD become a derogatory term, or do you just personally feel that they're boring to work on?

Tons of useful applications involve Creating, Reading, Updating, and Deleting database records at their core. Facebook and Twitter are essentially giant CRUD apps, so is every CRM system ever. Rails and similar frameworks provide scaffolding for automagically building functioning bare-bones CRUD apps with just a few keystrokes, relieving developers of the boring, repetitive part and freeing them to work on the unique business logic.

I dunno, maybe I'm a dork, but I guess I kind of think CRUD apps are cool.

Edit: OK, I admit that they're not nearly as cool as machine vision for aiming lasers, though. :)

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I think CRUD apps have become a bit of an in-joke because they are common and often superficially differentiated. Every non-technical client with an idea for a product talks about building a platform for X, but at the end of the day, they're usually "just" asking for a CRUD app. It's a bit unfair because there's nothing wrong with CRUD apps--you can build a pretty solid business off of them. Maybe that's why the HN crowd isn't a fan ;-)

>What's wrong with CRUD apps?

They are full of boilerplate, unimaginative uses of computing, the re-invent the same bloody wheels again and again, and that should have been automated much more already.

>Has CRUD become a derogatory term

Yes, for at least a decade.

While the tone of your comment comes across as a bit negative, I appreciate it because it got me thinking about ways to automate CRUD apps even more than Rails already has.

Perhaps it could be a framework or application that would allow a non-programmer user to create basic CRUD apps with some sort of "app builder wizard" GUI by simply defining the record fields and their data types. Then it would automatically generate the tables and the corresponding models, and the create/edit views just like Rails does. It could also expose basic access/permissions configurations and have a bundle of CSS files to select from for the GUI styling, and a drag-and-drop interface for selecting GUI elements.

Basically, I'm picturing something like a cross between Rails and a version of MS Access with a more user-friendly front end a "real" database behind it. Or just a GUI version of Rails, bundled with some HTML/CSS view/style templates, really. Or "the Wordpress of CRUD apps." (Maybe this exists already and I don't know about it?)

Of course, if someone made something like this and got business users to actually use it to build their CRUD apps themselves, it could put a lot of CRUD app developers out of business!

>While the tone of your comment comes across as a bit negative, I appreciate it because it got me thinking about ways to automate CRUD apps even more than Rails already has.

Well, it's a little negative, but I've made my fair share of CRUD apps at one time.

>Of course, if someone made something like this and got business users to actually use it to build their CRUD apps themselves, it could put a lot of CRUD app developers out of business!

Hmm, I have a friend that attempted something like that -- his startup was featured on TechCrunch IIRC: http://app2you.com/site/index.html

What I'm thinking of is like an open source project for a "one-click" installer that deploys a default/pre-configured Rails application, with a GUI wrapper (similar to Wordpress) that allows you to visually design the database schema, generate the scaffolding with the click of a button, and swap out themes for style and plugins for added functionality.

I don't think this idea (RailsPress?) is so original that no one's thought of it before, but it doesn't seem like anyone's really executed it yet. I'm thinking about starting a Github repo for this if there isn't already an existing one I can contribute to.

Edit: It looks like there is a repo called "RailsPress" but it's just a port of WordPress to Ruby on Rails, not a framework for allowing non-programmers to generate generic RoR applications.

Not sure, I'll have to ask him. There are some 2012 updates on the site, but I thing he moved on to something else now.

>I don't think this idea (RailsPress?) is so original that no one's thought of it before, but it doesn't seem like anyone's really executed it yet. I'm thinking about starting a Github repo for this if there isn't already an existing one I can contribute to.

Sounds like something that, if executed well, can have a real market.

I'm surprised there isn't any SaaS offering something similar for SMEs. Like the way WooForms let's you make, well, query forms.

CRUD apps are boring. Even if the process of development is made less boring, the final product is still just a CRUD app. :)

My vast naivety may be showing here but isn't every web app essentially a CRUD app?

A lot of them are, but they are differentiated by the run-of-the-mill database front-end CRUD app by their concept.

E.g, is Twitter a CRUD app? At the programming level maybe, but the core idea behind the service is quite different.

And there are the more interesting non CRUD apps. Google Docs. Google Maps. Photoshop.com. Multiplayer online Games. Online Editors. Online Validators. Real-time collaboration apps. Etc etc.

Not necessarily. A CRUD app is an app whose primary capability is allowing the user to interact with a relational database for storing and retrieving records.

Google Search is one obvious example of a web app that has absolutely nothing to do with CRUD. It uses a search algorithm to search a massive priority-ranked data structure that represents an index of many millions of popular web pages.

ok good point, thanks. I don't know why I didn't think of search....

I don't know what is wrong with CRUD apps (never worked on one). I just see people complaining about working on them so I felt lucky to have never worked on one. I meant no offense.

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