hcl VS lowdefy

Terraform HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is an essential language for cloud engineers in 2024, particularly for those involved in infrastructure as code (IaC) practices. HCL is the configuration language used by Terraform, a widely adopted tool that enables engineers to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure using a declarative configuration approach. Learning Terraform HCL allows cloud engineers to automate the deployment and lifecycle management of cloud resources across various service providers, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and scalability of cloud environments.

Reminds me of [HCL](https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl), but without all the providers to deploy the config?

HCL: A Go implementation structured configuration language. The native syntax of HCL is inspired by libucl and nginx configurations. It is used to create a structured configuration language that is friendly to humans and machines, mainly for DevOps tools, server configurations, and resource configurations as a Terraform language.

HCL has a JSON representation [1], internally, objects behave that way. so it should be possible to write a Jsonnet wrapper around it. Terraform can currently parse json pipelines too.

[1]: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/json/spec.md

>https://noyaml.com/

I'm not sure this is the criticism you think it is. Wow, so you basically have to add quotes to get strings in some ambiguous situations?

Yeah sure you could probably improve YAML by getting rid of these weird pitfalls, but that is a minor improvement. The alternative isn't something like TOML, because YAML is optimized for hierarchical configuration. It's every vendor implementing a different syntax such as Hashicorp with their HCL [0].

[0] https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl

The Hashicorp corporation has made a huge impact in providing valuable tools and platforms in the cloud ecosystem. The advantage of using the tools they provide, such as Terraform, Vault, and Packer, is that they all have the same language, Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). This means you can easily pick up any of these tools by learning HCL, which is similar to JSON. This approach can be useful when choosing tools to learn or use for a project.

Format is HCL language feature: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/hclwrite/public.go

Hi, from what I read from HCL Github "HCL is a syntax and API specifically designed for building structured configuration formats.".

When the desired state is relatively simple to define and the mechanism to reach that state is not that important, writing up a declaration of what is needed and letting something/someone else deal with it is the most logical abstraction. This would be like drafting up the architectural draft for your new restaurant and paying a contracting company to actually build it, or writing HTML and letting a web browser render it, or writing a Terraform HCL file and letting the Terraform CLI tool apply it. This is called declarative programming in the software world, and has many advantages (and a few disadvantages!) for cloud infrastructure management.

I'm really enjoying reading through the docs and the tutorial. We've created Lowdefy, a config web-stack which makes it really simple to build quite advanced web apps. We're writing everything in YAML, but it has it's limitations, specifically when doing config type checking and IDE extensions that go beyond just YAML.

I've been looking for a way to have typed objects in the config to do config suggestions and type checking.. PKL looks like it can do this for us. And with the JSON output we might even be able to get there with minimal effort.

Is there anyone here with some PKL experience that would be willing to answer some technical questions re the use of PKL for more advanced, nested config?

See Lowdefy:

https://lowdefy.com/

https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

Awsome! With Lowdefy we tried to build a low-code framework that works like code. We’ve developed a schema in which to define applications and we’ve built all kinds of apps for enterprise customers. Massive, advanced CRM systems, call centre solutions, ticketing systems, a light MRP, all kinds of survey apps and so many dashboards. Even our docs and our website are Lowdefy apps!

Give Lowdefy a try and reach out it you have any questions or want to see what is possible :) (We need to invest a lot more into content and examples, bootstapping is a grind!)

https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

Also add Lowdefy onto the list https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

co-founder here :)

100% this. And yes, good documentation takes a lot of investment but it pays off like compound interest. But with that done, it becomes even more important not to pull the carpet for no good reason, you are building a tower and documentation is at the foundation.

We’ve built Lowdefy [1] as an open source project and documented it with all effort, 200 pages of docs. I often forget why or how something works and then jump to the docs. This investment keeps on paying of as we use Lowdefy to build customer apps, new devs in the team typically take less than two week to get up to speed and start making contributions, the sharp ones, just a two or three days.

This year, we’re extended our documentation onto customer apps aswell, with flow diagrams, state machine definitions, detailed field level explication schema definitions, and end user test procedures. The key here for this documentation is detail. It should be easier to reach for the docs and the the answer, than to dive in the code and interpret it.

1 - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy Co-Founder here.

Check out https://lowdefy.com/ they even have a sample survey app as one of their examples.

You can build an app that would do this

Lowdefy is a low code tool that uses AG Grid as a block component, allowing you to create apps which render data in AG Grid without a lot of coding knowledge. There is a Lowdefy example using AG Grid here.

Shameless plug, also check out Lowdefy - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

I’m also going to jump in here and say try Lowdefy https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy - co-founder here.

We take a different angle and believe that low code should still work like code. We focus on a developer first approach.