Over the past 5 years we’ve been building custom B2B and back office web applications. Nothing in the market had the level of customization we required both from a technical and commercial angle. So decided to standardize how we “configure” apps into a platform.
We did this by designing a schema by which to define web apps which is easy to read, write and understand, and works well with normal developer tools like editors, git and CI. While keeping it self hosted and even server-less.
Lowdefy has enabled us to rapidly deploy custom business apps like BI, CRM to MRPs.
Essentially we've written an engine which renders the YAML / JSON as a React app. So the backend serves the json config to the frontend which renders and interprets the app at runtime. There are 3 parts to the front-end, operators - which executes page logic, engine - which evaluates all page blocks, and renderer - which renders the components using react. The logic executes in a recursive loop, so if you look at the renderer [0] or operators [1] code it's actually quite simple. The engine part is a little more complex, but thats written in pure js, so it's easy to test.
All of this talks to a stateless node backend [3] which talks external connections or data sources.
> Are exported projects cloud host agnostic?
Yes. Open-source and self-hosted. We run apps on Netlify (with functions), Serverless, Docker etc. We'll probably include a static build version which will allow to host a Lowdefy app as a static site. The docs is also just a Lowdefy app, so we can easily make it interactive [4] and autogenerate much it from a JSONSchema.
Over the past 5 years we’ve been building custom B2B and back office web applications. Nothing in the market had the level of customization we required both from a technical and commercial angle. So decided to standardize how we “configure” apps into a platform.
We did this by designing a schema by which to define web apps which is easy to read, write and understand, and works well with normal developer tools like editors, git and CI. While keeping it self hosted and even server-less.
Lowdefy has enabled us to rapidly deploy custom business apps like BI, CRM to MRPs.
Check it out :) https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy