Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs

193 pointsby bradmenezesalmost 3 years ago

Hey HN, I’m Brad, one of the creators of Superblocks and a YC alum, excited to share our internal tooling IDE.As developers ourselves, we faced the problem of building tons of internal admin UIs, backends to connect siloed data, reporting jobs, and data pipelines. For UIs we would build one-off React components. For integrations, we would have to decipher vendor docs and implement auth. Finally, for reporting jobs we had to handle failures and observability – many hours of repetitive engineering effort.So we built Superblocks, an internal tooling IDE to connect to any datasource (databases, APIs, data warehouses), drag and drop your common UI components (tables, charts, forms), spin up backend APIs and schedule cron jobs, all in one place.Since developers we spoke to hated repeatedly handling permissions, hooking up observability, configuring security and managing CI/CD pipelines, we built Superblocks to integrate with popular dev tools like Datadog, Elastic, GitHub, GitLab, Okta and more. Use our cloud version, or run a self-hosted agent to ensure your data never leaves your VPC [1].Superblocks is quite differentiated from other “low-code” tools out there: * 100% built for developers: observability, debuggability, version control, extend with Python & JS * A platform, not a point solution: An all-in-one builder for internal tools: app UIs, APIs and cron jobs * Agent architecture: source-available, stateless and lightweight vs a legacy on-prem deployment * Scalable pricing: Pay for apps by Creator and usage-based pricing for end users (based on day passes) so it’s affordable to have 100s or 1000s of end users. Workflows and Jobs are billed on the number of executions.A quick 4 min demo on the website: <a href="https://cdn.superblocks.com/superblocks-demo-06132022.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.superblocks.com/superblocks-demo-06132022.mp4</a> Developer docs: <a href="https://docs.superblocks.com" rel="nofollow">https://docs.superblocks.com</a> To illustrate Superblocks in action, we built this startup funding explorer last night [2]Would love to hear feedback![1] Agent <a href="https://github.com/superblocksteam/agent" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/superblocksteam/agent</a> [2] Superblocks Startup Explorer App <a href="https://app.superblocks.com/applications/4aab03cd-3b18-4138-aa8b-ac7c7592574f/pages/bdf59690-18a5-42d5-9014-250f8318a8cc?environment=production" rel="nofollow">https://app.superblocks.com/applications/4aab03cd-3b18-4138-...</a>

40 comments

arey_abhishekalmost 3 years ago

I am a co-founder of a competing OSS product called Appsmith. I discovered Superblocks early this year and my first reaction was that the UI builder looks similar to Appsmith. Examined the DOM, and it was Appsmith code under the hood.I’m new to the FOSS world and it was quite interesting to see someone use our project to compete with us.

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Nimsicalalmost 3 years ago

[Disclaimer: my company is using Superblocks and have been paying for it for about a year]Been reading the comments and I think there are a bunch of questions about why companies would use a tool like this and that integrating your product / company into it is potentially risky. Here's why we decided to use it.First thing you should know is that before we moved to Superblocks, we were using a combination of Retool, Google Cloud Scheduler, Mode Analytics, and a few small Google App Engine apps to solve our problems.There is a whole ecosystem of apps and mini-products our engineering team has to build which require slow-paced maintenance, but are still mission critical to our business. Analytics dashboards, Slack reporters, revenue dashboards, customer service dashboards, Discord bots, etc.There are plenty of different tools which solve some of those problems in silo, but the main problem (and beauty) of building internal apps is that you can fully solve for your unique business problem. We're a tech-enabled advertising agency (there are a handful of companies like ours in the world) and we both have our own external product as well as a series of internal apps that power our operations.We decided to move all our internal apps to Superblocks effectively because we could merge a few different platform layer things (Google Cloud Scheduler, App Engine, Mode, Retool) and be able to build much faster within our team. The big thing for us was that we have engineers writing in Python (more data heavy stuff), and engineers writing Javascript. Previously, we had to have them offer APIs to each other and it wasn't as agile as it is today for simple things we had to build for our business stakeholders.I remember seeing one of our first Workflows on Superblocks when our data scientist built a BigQuery step, a Python step, and then our Javascript engineers grabbing that to do some post-processing with it to display the data and thinking "this is probably how most tiny apps will get built in the future".I don't want to have infrastructure for every tiny solution I built for our team. I just want things to work.

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andybakalmost 3 years ago

I never watch videos (I can't skim read a video and they usually involve audio and that's usually inconvenient).So without the video I'm struggling to understand what "programming" with superblocks means. Is it drag and drop visual programming? Show me a screengrab. Is it coding? What does the syntax look like?Is it a mixture of both? I want to see both.Yes - I'm lazy and probably could have read more but lazy, busy people are good test subjects as they probably make up the majority of eyeballs.

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twakefieldalmost 3 years ago

Congrats! Seems like a Retool competitor but focused more on developers? I'm not sure if that's the direction I would go since developers already have pretty good tooling for their level of expertise, IMO.Although, I could see how building an app that uses data across the various SaaS tools a company uses without requiring that data to be dumped into another database could be useful. Maybe I'm missing the point.As an aside, I'd love to see Retool but for less technical people. Specifically, a way to make Google Sheets available for multiple people in a company to use. We have multiple quick and dirty "calculators" (think pricing for sales, comp for recruiting) that we roll out across our company. Eventually they get operationalized and converted into proper applications (or we buy a SaaS product for it) but would be nice to have an interim solution. Some requirements:- Ability to create a very simple CRUD web UI- Authz/n with ability for IT to integrate into their SSO.- Google Sheets backend and integration so financial analysts can update and manage.

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hzeng0615almost 3 years ago

I have used airplane for scheduled jobs, I like their configuration/definition file driven development flow. I am not a fan of writting code in browser.

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phoenixboxalmost 3 years ago

Super cool. It's likely in the works but it would be cool to have more recipes / mini templates to start with on the application builder. E.g. a list of most active users or something similarly generic to help me get to something real faster. Also the ability to add an integration / connect postgres from the 'new api' prompt rather than having to go back to the dashboard first

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edf13almost 3 years ago

What’s the lock-in? As in - when we’ve built a UI/app is it locked into a subscription?What happens if you go out of business or we stop subscribing?

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ianbickingalmost 3 years ago

I like the UI integration. Feels similar in purpose to UIPath or other robotic process automation systems, but I don't have enough experience to compare.Looking at the video, at 1:02 you do put in code to open yourself to SQL injection... it's for internal tools, but still...

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antonylalmost 3 years ago

How does this compare to Retool (<a href="https://retool.com" rel="nofollow">https://retool.com</a>)? We use Retool at my company and like it; this seems like it is similar, but targets non-developers and is less mature (e.g. in the quality of the components)?

turtlebitsalmost 3 years ago

Looks like it has tons of potential, but from watching your demo, developing steps using a bunch of form fields is going to be very tedious, especially when you're trying to test/debug things and have to flip between screens constantly.

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foxbeealmost 3 years ago

Congrats on the announcement Superblocks team. I am the cofounder of Budibase - an open source alternative to Superblocks.For us, as developers, it was critical that this type of tool had to be open source - like the other tools we used and came to love and rely on.Credit for building the platform. Observability is a great idea and something I've not seen before in low code platforms.For reference, to the wider community, if you are interested in an open source alternative, here's a link to the Budibase github:Budibase Github Repo: <a href="https://github.com/Budibase/budibase" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Budibase/budibase</a>Appsmith is another open source alternative.

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henrythe9thalmost 3 years ago

Congrats on the launch Brad and Ran and team! We've been an early customer of Superblocks for a long time and have been thoroughly impressed with the team and product.We evaluated all of the low-code builders in the market (including both paid and open source) and eventually decided to use Superblocks for some of our core operational tools and workflows due to the power & flexibility of the tool, the focus on access & security, the team's unparalleled support and the pricing model.It's been great working with the team and they've been nothing short of fantastic. We can't wait to build more with Superblocks and see what they release next.

wizwit999almost 3 years ago

Is this open source? Btw your demo is really slow on my phone.

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felideonalmost 3 years ago

Interesting. This is kind of like Camunda without the BPMN baggage and a full blown IDE that integrates all the frontend/UI aspects with the backend workflow stuff. With Camunda, you have to build your own frontend past the auto-generated task forms. It’d also be interesting to see what a rule engine would look like in Superblocks.You say source-available, but I do wonder what happens with all your apps/workflows if Superblocks goes belly up. It doesn't seem like there’d be an easy way to migrate off it. With Camunda, their modeler and engine is open source and all the code you write is like any other code—it exists in your own git repo.(PS: Not a Camunda shill, but have built proofs-of-concept with it in the past, and am evaluating it again.)

lookesalmost 3 years ago

Looks good but I don't think I would try any tool unless it is open source as a developer.

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naltunalmost 3 years ago

The code snippet in this [0] example from the index page (top) looks to have an f-string issue:return [<pre><code> { "message": "{t.name} is due for {t.due_days} days", "assignee": t.assignee, } for t in tickets </code></pre> ][0] <a href="https://assets-global.website-files.com/627d359d0e0aa265b7817bcf/62a0fa061b0b805437a8d59a_hero_visual-new.png" rel="nofollow">https://assets-global.website-files.com/627d359d0e0aa265b781...</a>E: Fix formatting (TIL HN doesn't support code blocks)

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PhilipDainekoalmost 3 years ago

The problem with all these no-code/low-code tools is that they are not Turing complete. Wherever you need to do something custom, you have to write code.

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victor9000almost 3 years ago

Question regarding:> while keeping Superblocks up-to-date from our cloudDoes that mean that the OPA auto updates? Or is it saying that I can configure the frontend to use a custom backend?

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mbestoalmost 3 years ago

Super interesting. Is the idea that this is like Retool, but a little more dummy'd down (in a good way) and has cron/workflow capabilities?

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shrisukhanialmost 3 years ago

Looks great. Might be simplifying too much but is it basically like Retool + cron jobs? Super interesting if that's the case :)

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yhfy2006almost 3 years ago

I think the python functioning is super useful for my application on superblock. but it only provides basic functionalities. are you guys going to make it more powerful like importing project from my own codebase/github repo. So I can use a lot of my own code components, and the abilities to install additional packages.

a24whitealmost 3 years ago

We are another of Superblocks' early customers, and we've found it really useful for creating internal tools quickly. We still prefer to write some of our more heavyweight tools in React to leverage component reuse, etc, but we like this for lightweight tools that don't have a lot of complex frontend logic.

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upupandupalmost 3 years ago

What sort of company size would find this useful? I can already see several pushbacks against this type of tool.

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Seichalmost 3 years ago

This could be really useful in healthtech, is it HIPAA compliant by any chance?

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insomniacityalmost 3 years ago

So when you use the on-prem agent, does it rewrite all the backend endpoints to point at the agent, and continue serving the frontend externally?

natashabakeralmost 3 years ago

Looks awesome but how do you handle version control? Also, can permissions be set on who is able to modify vs. view/run a job?

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guymoritaalmost 3 years ago

Awesome. Looks like a great way to save redundant dev hours creating internal tools

ivanzhaoalmost 3 years ago

This looks awesome for support teams building their internal tools!

artem_dudinskyialmost 3 years ago

Very interesting! Looks easy to create some internal admin tool.

taleesitaalmost 3 years ago

As someone who used to have to hack internal tools, love that superblocks is making this easier!

zcmackalmost 3 years ago

yes! more options to save me from powerapps. looks good so far.

jayanthalmost 3 years ago

Super exciting. What industries or applications are you guys tackling first? Congrats!

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mohinishalmost 3 years ago

Nicely done, now I dont need to write custom tooling for internal applications.

tuxie_almost 3 years ago

Given the comments I'm used to seeing in general in HN, the over excited tone of the comments in this post makes me wonder how truthful all the praising is, or if they are related to the company in any way. Maybe HN is actually full of people who build internal tools and find this honestly awesome and a game changer.

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debarshrialmost 3 years ago

I have been actively following this space. I think there is a huge fallacy in a tool like this. At surface most of the developers love the idea, you often get feedback that people would use it but time comes people just not integrate their service with a platform like this. You have to build huge amount of trust either by raising from popular VC, Angel's, blogpost by reputed dev advocates, socialproofing. For a general purpose framework it is generally an uphill battle. Having said that, there has been outcomes in past like rundeck's acquisition by pagerduty. One thing I noticed that platform who have built some features that bound them to certain usecases done really well. Platform with a horizontal is a very long road than a platform with certain purpose, it also makes it easy to sell. Just some thoughts.

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snirdalmost 3 years ago

Cool product, nice features, too important to rely on such a young company.Sorry to be that guy, but I would never rely the business core on a company like that. That's why I like Tooljet: <a href="https://www.tooljet.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.tooljet.com</a> (no affiliation) - they are open source. That mitigates the risk to a level that I'd personally accept.

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maddynatoralmost 3 years ago

beautiful. Looks really great!!

berezalmost 3 years ago

Looks awesome, internal tools are usually such a pain to build and maintain (and tough to prioritize relative to customer-facing features). Excited to see this!

daniellangeralmost 3 years ago

Gamechanging. Built an internal admin tool with Superblocks in just a few minutes - definitely saved me hours of time and let me focus on building my core product. Congrats on building an awesome product already.

soumyadebalmost 3 years ago

We are glad to be one of Superblock's early customers to build some of our internal tools and are super happy about it. Congrats on your official launch.