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- Hey Simon,
although I'm coming from a different starting point, it seems like some of our thoughts have aligned. I'm building https://caipi.ai/ as a workspace for agents to build simple data driven apps. The agent edits through MCP and the user gets an interactive app in the browser.
If you're interested picking each others brains around this topic, I'd be psyched to have a chat. gh:pietz.
by pietz - Looks like a good addition to the datasette ecosystem. I have been working on a similar idea with cusom html around sqlite databases. By default a faceted search interface is generated but by reusing the client side data layer, custom apps are made easy.
The design keeps data and presentation together and even maps do not rely on external services.
I have called it Pihka: https://ghentcdh.github.io/Pihka/ https://github.com/GhentCDH/Pihka
by joren- - From TFA:
> a Datasette-style backend to a self-contained HTML frontend is an astonishingly powerful combination.
1000% agree. And datasette is a terrific framework to build any kind of data exploration or visualization on.
This sounds like an awesome feature and a good excuse for me to dive back into playing with Datasette.
by 20after4 - I never understood why someone hasn't made a framework that makes it stupidly easy to fill an HTML page with SQLite database tables, with all the usual display controls, and with as much "liveness" as desired, and with a protocol (over HTTPS) to manage comms to a server-side instance. SQLite is robust, lightweight, bulletproof - a WASM build belongs on ALL the webpages !by euroderf
- It is pretty cool that we have browser features like this to rely on.
I remember writing code in the bad old days to parse HTML tags and allowlist specific attributes. Now browsers have a much better solution baked in.
But it still makes me a bit nervous. Seems like a very small bug could sneak in. This is a good example of where I would reach for Fable to double check the implementation and have a lot of extra tests.
(nit: would be nice if the chat box treated Enter and Shift+Enter the way these other companies have trained my brain, but maybe that is a deliberate choice.)
by jacobgold - Multiple projects are coming to the same point it seems. Motherduck has been marketing "dives" since the beginning of the year (https://motherduck.com/blog/duck-dive-and-answer/) and in the Louie.ai team, we have been iterating on different patterns for similar needs. I'm getting the feeling that the answer to SaaS apps as fixed UIs over databases being dead because of coding agents means just the fixed dashboard pattern is dead, not SaaS, and BYO UI is part of the new table stakes.
I'm curious where the pattern will go. My sense is there is a split between cathedrals vs bazaar for approach here, where cathedrals are quite rigid app builders, think framer/wix, while bazaars focus a layer below for more flexibility but less integrated.
by lmeyerov - When I've needed something like this in the past I've spun up simple HTML pages and used the json endpoint that all datasette instances come with [0]. I like this new pattern much better, as it keeps your app and data in one place (I remember having some issue with this at the time, though I can't remember what the actual issue was)
So I imagine we could now load some data in to sqlite, design some HTML also loaded in to the db, and deploy. Although looking at the source, it seems like stored apps are expected to be managed by the plugin itself, but I'm sure there's a way around that
[0] Eg from one of the examples - https://datasette.io/legislators/-/query.json?sql=select+*+f... . If you strip the '.json' you get the html view. For what it's worth there's also a '.csv' version.
by anitil - To save anyone else wondering what is Datasette a search:
“Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.
Datasette is aimed at data journalists, museum curators, archivists, local governments, scientists, researchers and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world. It is part of a wider ecosystem of 44 tools and 154 plugins dedicated to making working with structured data as productive as possible.”
by fsuts