This is very unfortunate news. I have a lot of respect for the founders & the product. In fact I even used Airplane for a few side projects in the past. It's sad to see the product die.
IMO, most folks alluding to them running out money is incorrect. I think they simply ran out of energy or the will to go on. This is very common among early stage companies. But, as consumers, it also highlights the dangers of betting a large part of your workflows on any closed source SaaS. It can disappear with the drop of a hat.
This is why adopting OSS alternatives is essential. OSS solutions like Appsmith, puts you, the user, in control and allows you to determine how you'd like to control your stack. Your migration plans and functioning of tools isn't determined by events halfway across the world & outside your control.
If you are looking to move your workflows from Airplane, we have an early version that resembles Airplane. Do reach out to me at arpit [at] appsmith.com and let us help you.
Personally, I think commercial open source (COSS) technologies are pretty much the only solution to this problem. This way you aren't beholden to a company stopping their service and leaving you on your own. COSS ensures the project is maintained and if it isn't you can always self-host and migrate on your timeline instead of a vendor mandated timeline.
Completely agree. No code is great for simple CRUD apps but unfortunately, anything reasonably complex requires code. This is why we ended up building Appsmith which is an open source "low code" application builder. You can write custom JS code across the board & customize your application to build more complex apps. Makes getting started easy but also keeps you going for a long time.
Because a framework with components is just basic UI building blocks. There's a lot more that goes in building a full-fledged app. Layouts, page design, dynamic data, business logic etc. A low code builder like Appsmith helps devs orchestrate all of this much more easily.
I’m the author of the article and the CTO of Appsmith, an open-source low-code application builder platform. Since Appsmith is primarily a self-hosted software, we decided to forego Docker’s suggested best practices of single container, single process. We decided to run 5 services inside a single Docker container managed with supervisord! This keeps Appsmith’s “monolithic” philosophy alive while still modularizing the components inside.
Users definitely succeed a lot more with installing Appsmith on their servers, but I'd love to hear feedback on any pitfalls or unintended consequences that I probably didn't think about.
PS: @todsacerdoti thanks a lot for posting this article :)
As the CTO and co-founder of Appsmith, I wanted to share our experience of choosing the right architecture for the product. In this blog post, I talk about our decision to go with a modular monolithic architecture, and how it benefits our users.
We initially considered a microservice-based architecture, but soon realized it would complicate on-premise deployment for our end users. We then relied on a purely monolithic architecture during our early days, but eventually encountered problems in extensibility and horizontal scaling. That’s when we reached a middle ground - the modular monolith.
I am working right now on a follow up post that will detail out the architecture itself. I hope this post is helpful for those of you who are also grappling with this decision. Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Thank you!
Hey zackkatz, I'm Arpit, the CTO of Appsmith. Thank you so much for surfacing this Github issue. I know it's quite an old one and we still haven't provided a fix. I'll bump this up internally on our priority list.
Btw, since you are trying to connect to your web host, can I ask if you are self-hosting Appsmith or you are using Appsmith Cloud (https://app.appsmith.com) ?
Co-founder of Appsmith here. Thanks a lot for mentioning our project.
We love Typescript and chose it to take advantage of static type checking. At Apspmith, since we are a small team, we wanted to reduce management overheads and opted for a monorepo layout. Typescript went a long way in helping us organize the code into modules and let our build scripts compile relevant modules for each changeset.
Having said that, Appsmith has been a learning experience in efficiently running a large project with lots of files. Feel free to dig into our source code to learn from our experiences. :)
Hey, lead maintainer of Appsmith here. Thank you so much for the kind words. :)
We are currently working on improving the UI so that you can build more modern-looking applications. Is there anything that you think we should improve/add to the product?
Love what you have done with AppSmith. I started with Budibase but their query language didn't allow for cross collection/db queries. Then I learned about AppSmith and it was absolutely phenomenal. I wasn't particularly impressed by the UI (Uify looks much more modern) but I wasn't building anything public. Here's my use-case:
- Managing users (user data is spread across multiple services/db so JS works very well here)
- SaaS analytics (total users, monthly users, subscriptions etc. For this AppSmith's charts "just worked" along with full support for MongoDB query language).
- Managing small internal tools (sending emails to users via GUI etc.)
I haven't tried some of the new stuff you guys have shipped yet (the new table, some light customization etc.). The whole reason behind choosing something like AppSmith was that I will only have to be concerned about data. No fuss about UI. No manual styling. No tinkering. For this AppSmith is perfect.
Along this line, I think what would be absolutely amazing is something like themes. They should be separate (think like editor themes). Theme designers can design how the widgets will look. Builders will focus on what they want to build. Instead of adding multitudes of controls and customizability in the widget view, this would be a better approach imo since I'd never be able to customize everything consistently which would result in a really broken UI.
Aside from that, AppSmith is great. Oh another thing that really frustrated me was the small inline editor for events/callbacks. It'd be super helpful to allow maximizing it somehow. Another thing in the same line is allowing importing modules. So for example, I can use AppSmith's minimal SDK to code my logic in TS using VSCode and then import that into AppSmith and it just works. It'd also allow using JS-only libraries from npm etc. This is definitely not as simple as it sounds but you get the idea.
I'm the creator of Appsmith, an open source internal apps builder. We just launched native GraphQL support in Appsmith. With this addition you can write GraphQL queries with variables faster in a neat two-pane layout.
You can expect to see a 20%-30% improvement in dev productivity with:
* Intuitive auto-complete and auto-indent for code
* Fragments for repeated params
* Cursor-based and offset-based pagination
We are excited for the future of Appsmith + GraphQL. Give it a spin and let us know what you think.
Thanks for using Appsmith! Appreciate the kind words. :)
If you ever need help in building more complex use cases, please reach out to me at arpit [at] appsmith.com. Will be glad to help in any way that I can.
This is very unfortunate news. I have a lot of respect for the founders & the product. In fact I even used Airplane for a few side projects in the past. It's sad to see the product die.
IMO, most folks alluding to them running out money is incorrect. I think they simply ran out of energy or the will to go on. This is very common among early stage companies. But, as consumers, it also highlights the dangers of betting a large part of your workflows on any closed source SaaS. It can disappear with the drop of a hat.
This is why adopting OSS alternatives is essential. OSS solutions like Appsmith, puts you, the user, in control and allows you to determine how you'd like to control your stack. Your migration plans and functioning of tools isn't determined by events halfway across the world & outside your control.
If you are looking to move your workflows from Airplane, we have an early version that resembles Airplane. Do reach out to me at arpit [at] appsmith.com and let us help you.