anvil-runtime VS Metabase

Founder here. Self hosting is a thing - just "pip install anvil-app-server"!

https://anvil.works/open-source

To be fair, it has a free tier which gives you most of Anvil's features and lets you build unlimited apps. There's also the open-source app server if you want to host your apps yourself and work around the paid tier's DB limits: https://github.com/anvil-works/anvil-runtime

The runtime is open source: https://github.com/anvil-works/anvil-runtime

https://github.com/anvil-works/anvil-runtime#using-the-stand...

The code is GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3.

anvil server

Anvil is a platform for building web apps with nothing but Python - no HTML, CSS or JavaScript required. Anvil also comes with lots of built-in features like one-click deployment, databases, user authentication, email and the open-source app server.

anvil.works

Anvil | Software Developer | Cambridge, UK | On-site/Semi-Remote | Full-time or Part-time | https://anvil.works/jobs

Anvil | Junior Software Developer | Cambridge, UK | On-site/Semi-Remote | Full-time or Part-time | https://anvil.works/jobs

Anvil | Developer Advocate | Cambridge, UK | On-site/Semi-Remote | Full-time or Part-time | https://anvil.works/jobs

Help us fix web development at Anvil (https://anvil.works)!

Web development is way too hard – Javascript, HTML, CSS, SQL, and frameworks coming out of your ears. So we built Anvil: a simpler way for anyone to build full-stack web apps, entirely in Python. Anvil is a web framework; it’s an online code editor; it’s a GUI builder; and it’s a hosting platform. And you’ll be helping us with all of it.

We're looking for:

SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS:

Build the platform that's fixing web development for everyone. You’ll be working on the Anvil editor (that’s the development environment, code editor, drag-and-drop designer, version control, and so on) and the Anvil runtime (that’s the Python-to-JS compiler, UI toolkit, database, integrations, and the hosting engine that makes it so easy to deploy).

Our stack is mostly Javascript, Clojure and Python (in descending order of line count). We don’t need you to be an expert in all of these already, and for the junior role we don't need any. Otherwise, we’ll want to see evidence that you can hit the ground running with at least one of them – or that you’re a great all-rounder who won’t have a problem with any of them.

Much (or most) of your work will be open source: https://anvil.works/open-source

DEVELOPER ADVOCATES:

We need developers with great communication skills, to show people how to build awesome things with Anvil. You’ll be writing how-to guides, blog posts and tutorials, building example apps, presenting Anvil at conferences (when those resume), and helping our users – from individual developers to huge tech companies – build their applications. And then you’ll help us work out how to improve Anvil for them.

It's rewarding work – developers love being introduced to Anvil (our stand is always crowded[0] at conferences!). Plus, there are all the advantages of an early-stage startup: lots of autonomy, and huge impact.

We're bootstrapped and profitable, with customers ranging from tiny startups to household names. Find out more: https://anvil.works/jobs

Are you using the `--uplink-key` flag or `--client-uplink-key` flag when running your app with the app server? Anvil App Server - advanced config

Remote Code Execution via H2

We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as an actual business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme.

After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.

[0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase

I've never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (https://metabase.com). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.

It seems folks want a working example. Here's one in prod:

Metabase is a BI tool, backend written mostly in Clojure. Like basically all BI tools they have this intermediate representation language thing so you write the same thing in "MBQL (metabase query language)" and it theoretically becomes same query in like, Postgres and Mongo and whatever. End user does not usually write MBQL, it's a service for the frontend querybuilding UI thing and lots of other frontend UI stuff mainly in usage.

Whole processing from MBQL -> your SQL or whatever is done via a buncha big-ass transducers. Metabase is not materially faster than other BI tools (because all the other BI tools do something vaguely similar in their langs) but it's pretty comparable speed and the whole thing was materially written by like 5 peeps

https://github.com/metabase/metabase/blob/master/src/metabas...

(nb: I used to work for Metabase but currently do not. but open core is open core)

They haven't released the source, and the compiled versions are non-trivial to diff (e.g. there are nondeterministic numbers from the clojure compiler that seem to have changed from one to the other, and .clj files have been removed from the jar).

The old version has `hash=1bb88f5`, which is a public commit: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/commit/1bb88f5

We are unsure about the right license to use, so this is a great feedback. We had a MIT license one week ago that we know that we cannot hold on long term and we felt we were lying to the community by keeping an MIT license and changing it in one year.

By using AGPL, we feel it's the right level of restriction. It's the license used by Metabase for example (https://github.com/metabase/metabase) that many companies use internally.

The solution really depends on what sort of problems you are trying to solve and who your customers are.

There are a fair few low-code solutions out there for reporting and data visualisation that are great for finance and marketing teams for example. e.g. https://metabase.com/ , https://evidence.dev/

For multipurpose SMB workflows and organisational processes, I have used n8n in the recent past and found it was quite good and incredibly easy to maintain. https://n8n.io/engineering-resources/

For enterprise processes I'd go with Camunda (solely based on recommendations and not first hand experience). Although only parts of their platform are OSS https://github.com/camunda

Bear in mind that some of these are not suitable if you want to build something that competes with them while taking their OSS code. But are perfectly fine otherwise.

Anyway, I have a collection of scripts that merge ActivityWatch data from all my machines and WakaTime exports to a PostgreSQL database which I then query with a project called Metabase. If you're curious, the scripts are in a repository called sqrt-data. I've been playing with this for ~4-5 years already I think.

Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, and DevOps engineers

Metabase is open source analytics software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).