meredydd

Their control panel drives companies' entire online marketing operation - creative, targeting, performance, and more - across multiple advertising services. That's a whole lotta UI. Their back end drives the advertising platforms' APIs (eg Google and Facebook), and it all hooks into great big machine learning operations that run on big beefy servers out in EC2. Not just a pretty CRUD app, that's for sure.

(Unfortunately, they know what their services are worth, so I can't just point you at a live demo ;) )

Installing and running it is typically a single 'docker-compose' command. If you're interested in this option, please do drop us an email at sales@anvil.works.

Anvil's built in "Users" service is incredibly simple and un-magical (user records are just database rows, and you can reimplement vanilla password login in four lines). This makes hacking on it an awful lot easier than some magically injected extension that needs to be configured just so.

(Check out the API: https://anvil.works/doc#users)

(Nothing magic - it's just a database. Even user records are just table rows, so you can link or categorise them however you like!)

Yes you can! Check out all the code examples in: https://anvil.works/doc#forms

Multi-tenant/single-DB is a pretty common and straightforward pattern with a lot of support in Anvil (eg restricted views, as described in the video).

I'm also currently working on a multi-part video series, showing the creation of a SaaS product, from scratch to monetisation. Sign up for our mailing list, and watch this space :D

It's a library you `pip install`, which lets you connect Python code running anywhere in the world to your Anvil app. Everything you can do from Anvil server code, you can do from your Python code, wherever it's running. You can define server functions, HTTP endpoints, access data tables, etc.

We have customers controlling IoT devices with it (like that Raspberry Pi video). We also have companies driving big machine learning jobs on EC2 servers with tons of GPUs - but with all the UI and housekeeping in Anvil.

We'll also be adding more built-in themes before long :)

You can control which columns do and don't collapse on mobile or tablets. See this post from our user forum: https://anvil.works/forum/t/how-do-i-make-my-apps-look-nice-...

The client-side code is Python 2 only for now, but we're already upgrading our Python-to-Javascript compiler to include Python 3 syntax.

However, we run full CPython (2.7 and 3.6) on the server, so any language feature you like is just a function call away :)

Skulpt has a separate compiler stage that compiles Python to JS, and a runtime library. There's no need to eval() that code in the same JS VM that compiled it, so it's totally feasible to ship the JS to the client and run it there.

We're starting to post some larger examples (check out our "download portal" example at https://anvil.works/learn#examples - I'm also working on a video series building a SaaS app over the course of a few hours). But the biggest apps are, of course, our customers', and we can't really publish them as examples.

That said, even with the standard plans you can plug into your own Postgres database from server code (just `import psycopg` - it's only Python, after all). And using the Uplink, you can access Anvil's database from your code anywhere on the internet, with the same API as Anvil server code.

You might be interested in my talk from PyCon US this summer, where I talked about the compiler, and how we turn blocking Python code into non-blocking Javascript code:

https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk

https://twitter.com/anvil_works/status/924352019258920960

He just copied and pasted his code from the notebook into an Anvil server function, and it ran first time! It's all just Python, at the end of the day.

Right now we're taking it all as it comes, but we never want to lose our focus on accessibility: It's way too hard to build web apps with today's traditional tools, and we want to make it easier for everyone.

(Right now, it does run in the browser, but we'll be moving it to the back-end soon to improve performance. For now it's good enough.)

I started out on QBASIC and Visual Basic, back in the day, and as far as I'm concerned it's practically dereliction of duty that there wasn't something similar available for the web. Eventually, we got fed up enough to go and build it ourselves.

https://twitter.com/anvil_works/status/924648315983155200

As to your second point - yes, that's a common pattern. We see people going "oh, let me just sketch out the UI...well, I'll add a bit of code...oh, look, it's in production and scaling!"

We do have a lot of support for integrating with external systems, so it's easy to gradually move off from (or on to) Anvil. External access to the database is just the start of it :)

Usage limits are pretty soft right now (depends heavily on what you do in your code and how hard you're hammering our servers), but the general intention is to charge you more as you scale up your team, rather than because you got a few thousand users.

* Front-end code is compiled from Python to JS with Skulpt (http://skulpt.org)

* The back-end code runs in a custom Python sandbox. Calls to server functions go over a secure web socket (this lets us do fun things like returning database rows directly from server functions, rather than faffing with REST APIs all day)

* The built-in database (Data Tables) is based on Postgres, using its JSONB and GIN indexing to create a table you can search efficiently on any column. This also means that things like transactions are properly robust.

We also have a bunch of tutorial-cum-demo videos at: https://anvil.works/learn#tutorials

Urk? Firefox is an officially supported platform for the editor. What didn't work, and what version of FF are you using?

Once you've written an app, it should work in everything since IE11.

The crucial difference between Outsystems(/Bubble/etc) and Anvil is that Outsystems tries to be a "no-code" environment, and we think that's a mistake (or at least, a different market).

Delphi and Visual Basic proved that writing code isn't the problem - code is the best way to tell a computer what to do. But writing code in five different languages to produce "Hello World" on the web...now that will slow you down.

(Count 'em: JS, HTML, CSS, backend eg Ruby/Python, SQL. We do everything in Python, which gets you going much faster. We just got back from PyCon UK, where among other things we got an 8-year-old building database-backed web apps in an afternoon. That's the sort of thing that used to happen with VB/Delphi.)

Obligatory plug: Check out https://anvil.works - it is exactly that! Drag and drop UI, Python front-end and back-end, database integration...the whole deal.

It's deliberately built in the Delphi/Visual Basic tradition, and trying to carry those virtues onto the modern web.