potygen VS SQLpage

OMG this is one of my favorite tools paid for it all the way back when it went out. Have used it so many times just to write documentation for things like:

https://github.com/ivank/potygen/blob/main/packages/potygen/...

ASCII is just so versatile and allows you to put nice graphics in places where one does not expect, making things more easily understandable.

I also wrote a parser (in typescript) for postgres (https://github.com/ivank/potygen), and it turned out quite the educational experience - Learned _a lot_ about the intricacies of SQL, and how to build parsers in general.

Turned out in webdev there are a lot of instances where you actually want a parser - legacy places where they used to save things in plane text for example, and I started seeing the pattern everywhere.

Where I would have reached for some monstrosity of a regex to solve this, now I just whip out a recursive decent parser and call it a day, takes surprisingly small amount of code! (https://github.com/dmaevsky/rd-parse)

I used to agree 100% with this sentiment, as dissatisfaction with available ORMs at the time (early days of doctrine in PHP) drove me to actually write my own. Turned out an amazing exercise in why orms are hard.

Anyway a few years later I was in a position to start things fresh with a new project so thought to myself, great lets try to do things right this time - so went all the way in the other direction - raw sql everywhere, with some great sql analyzer lib (https://github.com/ivank/potygen) that would strictly type and format with prettier all the queries - kinda plugged all the possible disadvantages of raw query usage and was a breeze to work with … for me.

What I learned was that ORMs have other purposes - they kinda force you to think about the data model (even if giving you fewer tools to do so) With the amount of docs and tutorials out there it allows even junior members of the team to feel confident about building the system. I’m pretty used to sql, and thinking in it and its abstractions is easy for me, but its a skill a lot of modern devs have not acquired with all of our document dbs and orms so it was really hard on them to switch from thinking in objects and the few ways orms allows you to link them, to thinking in tables and the vast amounts of operations and dependencies you can build with them. Indexable json fields, views, CTEs, window functions all that on top of the usual relation theory … it was quite a lot to learn.

And the thing is while you can solve a lot of problems with raw sql, orms usually have plugins and extensions that solve common problems, things like soft delete, i18n, logs and audit, etc. Its easy even if its far from simple. With raw sql you have to deal with all that yourself, and while it can be done and done cleanly, still require intuition about performance characteristics that a lot of new devs just don’t possess yet. You need to be an sql expert to solve those in a reasonable manner m, just an average dev could easily string along a few plugins and call it a day. Would it have great performance? Probably not. Would it hold some future pitfalls because they did not understand the underlying sql? Absolutely! But hay it will work, at least for a while. And to be fair they would easily do those mistakes with raw sql as well, but with far few resources to understand why it would fail, because orms fail in predictable ways and there is usually tons of relevant blog posts and such about how to fix it.

It just allows for an better learning curve - learn a bit, build, fail, learn more, fix, repeat. Whereas raw sql requires a big upfront “learn” cost, while still going through the “fail” step more often than not.

Now I’m trying out a fp query builder / ORM - elixir’s ecto with the hopes that it gives me the best of both worlds … time will tell.

Saving further clicks:

> SQLPage is a tool that allows you to build websites using nothing more than SQL queries. You write simple text files containing SQL queries, SQLPage runs them on your database, and renders the results as a website.

The 22-line "TinyTweeter" example at 28:45 [0] in the video is a good overview - perhaps better than anything currently on the homepage/docs: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/blob/main/examples/tiny_t...

Also, based on a couple of discussions [1][2] it seems like SQLPage has the potential to combine well with HTMX too. The two projects definitely share a similar philosophy.

[0] https://youtu.be/mXdgmSdaXkg?t=1721

[1] https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/issues/84#issuecomment-19...

[2] https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/pull/175#issuecomment-187...

I am currently looking for a solution to run automated tests on a sql website generator I am working on ( https://sql.ophir.dev )

I wanted to use hurl (https://hurl.dev/), but Bruno's UI seems to be useful while developing the tests... Has someone tried both ? Which is better for automated testing, including when the response type is html and not json?

Full fledged BI tools like Superset and Metabase are amazing for their intended use cases.

But they may be an overkill if your primary use case is to infrequently build semi-interactive reports for non-technical end-users and your use cases are are mostly covered by standard graphs & tables. Esp. so if you are familiar with SQL and have access to the underlying data source. Two nifty utilities I have found to be very useful for latter kind of use cases are SQLPage and Evidence.

They make it very convenient to whip out some SQL and convert that to a neat professional looking web ui that can be forwarded to an end user. In case of Evidence it is a statically generated site, and in case of SQLPage it is a web app that connects to a live database.

SQLPage: https://sql.ophir.dev/

Evidence: https://evidence.dev

I feel obligated to add a shameless plug here. The idea is very close to a project I presented at pgconf.eu last week: SQLPage

https://sql.ophir.dev/

SQLPage has the same goal as postgrest+htmx, but is a little bit higher level. It let's you build your application using prepackaged components you can invoke directly from SQL, without having to write any HTML, CSS, or JS.

It would be great if someone could open a github issue with reproduction steps and maybe a screenshot: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/issues

The worst I'm able to get when manually disabling the cache and simulating a slow 3G connection is this: a blank page first, then text in the browser's font, then the text re-renders with the right font, then the icons load. The user should never see completely unstyled content.

The site uses "font-display: fallback" so this happens only on slow network connections. If the font loads fast enough, then the fallback never appears.

The official website for SQLPage (https://sql.ophir.dev/) is written in SQLPage.

The source code is here: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/tree/main/examples/offici...

The site also links to this little collaborative game written in SQLPage: https://conundrum.ophir.dev/

The github README has code snippets and associated screenshots: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage#examples

There is also an official repl.it that you can fork to quickly try it online without having to download anything: https://replit.com/@pimaj62145/SQLPage

And SQLPage cloud is coming: https://sql.ophir.dev/your-first-sql-website/hosted.sql

Hey HN community!

I'll be making my first ever presentation at a large tech conference at pgconf.eu this December, where I'll be presenting the SQLPage webapp micro-framework ( https://sql.ophir.dev/ ). I'm eager to make a lasting impression and deliver a presentation that truly resonates with the audience at the conference, who probably knows more about postgres than I do.

That's where I could use your insights. What makes a good tech talk in your eyes? Do you like seeing mind-blowing demos, deep dives into code, compelling storytelling, or something else entirely ?

If you have any specific advice, tips, or ideas for structuring a tech conference presentation, I'm all ears. I want to ensure that my presentation is not just informative but also an experience to remember.

Thank you in advance for your guidance and suggestion !

When I see that, I always wonder whether this is part of the business plan of the people who distribute open source software for free, with a paid hosted version. There is some kind of a conflict of interest: the easier the software is to install and operate, the less attractive the hosted version.

I am working on an open-source software with a hosted version myself ( https://sql.ophir.dev ). It's a website builder, and I'm trying to make ease of deployment and operations a competitive advantage, which is marketed on the home page. But it may be idealistic to ask the same of others. My audience is mostly people who will have to operate the software themselves, whereas in most other domains, the people making the choice to use the software and the people who will then have to operate it are not the same.