Community Forum Hosted Apps

[nathanguyette]

I love the ability to share apps when asking question or just showing off

However, what I don’t like is creating one off projects to demonstrate a point, only to litter my app collection, or click on a project that got deleted, which ruins future discussion of a topic.

My idea is pretty simple. For Apps like this, anvil can host them as “Community Forum Apps” that don’t get deleted, and don’t litter my work space or break links to apps that no longer exist.

https://anvil.works/build#clone:C2FGSPIRNFKFLZOI=OUNRETFS3QKO5LXIW5EDSZLL

^ For example if you click the above link you’ll get the following error:

[david.wylie]

Here’s a similar FR :

[DONE] Organization of Apps

EDIT: Please see @david.wylie 's equivalent FR: Hi there, As my list of apps gets large, I like to delete apps that I no longer need. The problem is that many of them are posted as examples on the forum. I delete an app, the links become invalid in the forum. I’d like those links to remain functional for the benefit of new users. I would like to request a feature to be able to organize apps. Stefano made a brief mention of app organization here but I haven’t seen this FR anywhere else.

We need to get this feature “liked” a lot, so it moves up their schedule.

To alter the paradigm slightly, I actually use https://pinboard.in to store the URLs to my frequently used apps (I have an “Anvil” tag), and I leave that page open on a pinned tab. You could also use the bookmark panel of your browser if you always use the same one/machine (I don’t).

But folders for apps would be preferable for sure.

[nathanguyette]

Maybe a default undeleteable folder could be “Community Hosted”

[p.colbert]

An alternative would be a tagging system.

An app can reside in only one folder at a time. But it might have multiple tags attached.

We would want to distinguish between Anvil-defined tags, and user-defined tags. Anvil could reserve a prefix for its own use.

[david.wylie]

I like that.

Also maybe pinning projects to the top of the list. I’m often working on half a dozen at a time, and having them at the top would be good.

[p.colbert]

That could be accomplished with a (Anvil-defined) tag, too.

The next step after flag-type tags is tags with assigned values. But for these to be most widely useful probably requires an API… and APIs can be a security hole.

This is starting to look like an entirely new Feature Request. Shall I create one? If so, what is the minimum that should go into it, to keep it well-focused?

[david.wylie]

@p.colbert

This is starting to look like an entirely new Feature Request. Shall I create one?

Yeah please.

@p.colbert

If so, what is the minimum that should go into it, to keep it well-focused?

Hmm… not sure I’ve got my thoughts coherent enough to be minimal yet …

The key for me is for minimum key presses to see what I consider to be the most important projects for the right now. I’d also like it to remember my selections.

So, here’s my wishlist in order of preference :

1. user defined tags (not sure what the division between user and anvil defined would be?)
2. special “pinned” tag and a check box with “Only Show Pinned?”
3. ability to select multiple tags for the project filter

If you look at https://pinboard.in they have a right hand panel of tags where you can click to see bookmarks labelled with those tags.

This is still probably a bit too broad …

[p.colbert]

Let’s sleep on it. Things will probably distill a bit overnight.

[nathanguyette]

Ooooo… Another thing that might be cool in the “My Apps” tab, a “Sort by Dependencies” option! Basically you can see your apps in a dependency tree view

[p.colbert]

@nathanguyette, could you make that a separate new request? That way, it can collect its own “Likes” (votes). I’d be delighted to be the 1st “Like”!

[nathanguyette]

@p.colbert, sure! I’ve posted it here:

“Sort by Dependencies” option in " My Apps "

Something pretty simple I would think, just sort all the apps into dependency trees when you click the checkbox “Sort by Dependencies”

[hjp]

After doing some fooling around, it seems that Anvil.Works is currently hosted on a single, beefy, VPS in London. Looking at app behaviour and their pricing model, I suspect they run all the Apps internally on an Edge Computing Paradigm. What this means is that your app only runs when used i.e is interacted with by a user. This allows them to host so many apps for free, I think.

Then comes another issue not mentioned (missed by me?);

Taking Snapshots of web pages and then archiving them on imgur or wayback is easy. Apps are dynamic and can’t be rendered, they have to be run.
So either Anvil.Works needs to provide App Archiving (which is not within reasonable expectations), or, someone has to sponsor Anvil Archives ™ as an extension of Anvil.Works.

But I really am convinced that this as a Feature Request is not within the scope of responsibility for Anvil.Works, since the Anvil source is closed.

[stucork]

Just a small related post about how anvil host their free apps @hjp - see the last sentence for the link to the talk.

Cannot access server module '/tmp' directory

Thank you Anvillistas, we will add a notice to the documentation to let people know that you can only access the filesystem from the Full Python environments. The Basic Python environments are PyPy Sandboxes. That means they politely ask us for permission before making system calls, so we can keep users completely secure from one another on the same machine. It’s the magic tech that lets us provide hosted Python back-ends for free! (And we sponsored the creation of the Python 3 version.) Of cou…

[hjp]

Thank you for the ancillary info @stucork, running my frankenstein scripts on someone elses’ server has luckily never been a priority for me. I’ts a relatively new debate, running scoped code vs. the traditional approach of managing VM’s and LXD containers. You can go take a look at the CVE Reports on the Vue.Js framework if you want a taste of the avalanche of issues that arise when you try to scope things too tightly… (more than 7000+ last time I checked)

To reflect on the initial issue, failure to access the file system on the current machine, has become bad practice to even attempt. Because it causes maintenance issues during deployment, the preferred method is to NOT make any reference or call to any static resource. Because your code is going to be running in a temporary container on a Virtual Machine, that entire App Instance might most probably not even exist after the user logs off. So generally you’d have a secure db server which is then lazily used for CRUD ops.

If you don’t have a lot of Data to deal with, use an array with MediaObject perhaps?

[stefano.menci]

Hi @hjp, I don’t understand your post.
Is it a question?
Is it a statement?
What type of answer are you looking for?

I don’t understand it, so I might be wrong, but it seems to be of topic here. What has your post to do with the management of community forum hosted apps?