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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Thanks for evaluating the product. I appreciate it.
The reason we allow users to write raw SQL within Appsmith is because it is geared to build dashboards and admin panels in scenarios where you don't have or don't want to write API layers on your database yet. Hence, this gives our users a balance of easy to start with & configurable to extend.
You can always start with raw SQL queries and upgrade to APIs whenever you have them ready. Since access control is in-built within the product, your queries are never exposed to users and are safe against any SQL injections as well.
Having said that, I totally understand if a low code product like Appsmith doesn't fit your needs today. I hope some day you'll have a use case that we can help with. :)
The primary reason for creating Appsmith was because, as a backend engineer, I didn't enjoy mucking around with HTML/CSS just to build admin panels. Hence, we created a way to build such apps really quickly.
Appsmith also has a deep integration with Git. This allows you to create feature branches, raise pull requests and have different branches for your staging and prod environments. This also allows you to rollback your application to an older version.
While there are obvious pitfalls of using a low code application, I'd wager that you'd be able to go much further, much more quickly than you initially estimated.
First of all, thank you for trying the product and sharing your feedback. I appreciate it.
While you can modify the source code to remove the watermark, you can also upgrade to the paid edition which helps keep the project sustainable. :) Additionally, you don't have to put in additional effort in keeping the fork up to date with our main repo.
I understand that our choice of single Docker container for hosting Appsmith may be counter-intuitive. We took that route because we were seeing lots of developers struggle with k8s (especially with multiple pods). That's why we actually simplified the experience to optimize for quick starts.
I look forward to your feedback and support for a growing open source project :)
Hey, creator of Appsmith here. Thanks for trying out the product.
To answer your first question; yes, it's possible to build dynamic apps that can countdown the seconds to zero or build a timer dynamically. The sample application: https://app.appsmith.com/app/input-widget/input-counter-reva... shows a counter. In this example, while a user is required to click a button, this can be modified to be triggered automatically every 1 sec.
It's currently not possible to power the UI via websockets yet. This is an open feature request that we are yet to implement.
Having said that, I'm sorry that Appsmith crashed for you. Were you trying us out on Appsmith Cloud (https://app.appsmith.com) or were you self-hosting Appsmith via Docker/k8s?
Please feel free to email me at arpit [at] appsmith.com & we'll help you out succeed with the product.
Thank you for trying Appsmith & apologies that you had a poor experience with the product.
Can I ask if you were pulling a lot of data from your databases to populate the UI? I'm asking because we definitely have our work cut out to handle larger amounts of data.
As you rightly said, Appsmith is written in Java which allocates 25% of available memory by default and expands to 75% memory. You can control this behaviour by adding APPSMITH_JAVA_HEAP_ARG="-Xmx2G" in the docker.env file.
First of all, thanks for trying out Appsmith and doing a security review. The link you pasted is actually an out-dated installation script that we used to use only for tracking if a user is facing errors during installation. This script has been deprecated approx 10 months ago. We should probably remove it from the code base as well to reduce confusions. Now, you can spin up a Docker container directly without having to go through any shell script.
Having said that, Appsmith doesn't track any PII data from an installation. Any & all telemetry within Appsmith is strictly opt-in. You can disable this as well when setting up Appsmith or any time afterwards. Please check https://docs.appsmith.com/telemetry#disable-telemetry for details.
We understand that security is paramount to users of Appsmith and thousands of teams use Appsmith to interact with sensitive data. Hence, we take data security very seriously. If you have any concerns about our security practices, I'd love to hear from you at security[at]appsmith.com. We will aim to fix any such concerns immediately within the product.
I think this is a very interesting concept. Will definitely shorten the REPL cycle from reporting a bug to recreating it in the code. I can see this being useful in QA and staging environments. Looking forward to the self hosted version for security reasons.
I’m Arpit, a co-founder of Appsmith (https://www.appsmith.com) along with Abhishek and Nikhil. Appsmith is an open source project to build simple CRUD apps, custom admin panels, and complex internal tools. Some users call it a low-code product, but we think of it more like a framework. We launched our project 13 months ago and since then have seen 7.1K GitHub stars and 100+ contributors. Today we announced our seed and Series A funding.
I started building Appsmith in 2019 because I’m a backend developer and I was tired of dealing with React, HTML, CSS for CRUD applications. Frontend development has become incredibly complicated and this is my attempt to simplify it for at least this kind of software. While Appsmith is empowering if you are a backend developer because it gives you a skill that you don't necessarily want to learn, it’s incredibly useful for any dev looking to create webapps really quickly. You can create pages visually and write JS for any customizations or data transformations.
If I have to describe Appsmith apps, I’d say that we provide the view and controller layer in MVC, while you bring the model layer. This means that your data is never stored within Appsmith.
Appsmith ships with 35 react components, 14 datasource integrations (including an API connector, user roles, user authentication, Git sync, real-time collaboration, JS and more). You can self-host us for free or use our cloud edition.
Future open source roadmap includes:
1. More widgets and integrations
2. Custom theming
3. Ability to use any JS library
4. Add any custom react component
5. Integration with Lambda to enable non-UI workflows
You can use our open source edition or cloud hosted edition for free today. We’ll be introducing a pricing plan for our cloud hosted edition as well as an enterprise edition in 2022.
Future commercial and enterprise edition roadmap includes:
1. Integration into more SSO providers
2. Audit logs
3. Granular role based access control
Hey kmwr, I'm the maintainer of Appsmith. The install script downloads and configures the docker-compose.yml file underneath the hood. It also allows users to configure SSL, setup encryption keys etc which would otherwise need to be done manually.
I understand that in order to have a repeatable installation process (as per Devops best practices), you'd like to have a single configuration file instead. We are working on some Helm charts for this very purpose.
For now, you can go through the process of installing Appsmith via the script and then use the generated files as a template in your Terraform/Ansible scripts.
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.