Right? It’s great to hear that. It does make me wonder anew, though, why more people don’t know about Anvil. (Maybe it’s just that there aren’t that many people like you and I looking for something like this, but I somehow doubt it.) Any ideas on what might have helped you discover it sooner?
Occasionally I would go hunting for toolkits and frameworks when I thought about it. For whatever reason, Anvil is the #7 hit for me on Google for “gui designer” with the description:
Anvil is a GUI builder that lets you build web apps with nothing but Python. Drag and Drop Builder. Build your UI with our drag-and-drop designer. No HTML or JS …
I am very sure this would have caught my eye before now if I had seen it. It may be that I was previously looking for gui designers for particular other toolkits and environments, like C# maui and wxWidgets/Python.
So maybe some SEO would help.
I used to write GUIs from scratch in C++ with just vim 2 decades ago. No thanks. I have paid my dues. I used wxPython for some apps and it’s ok for building but refactoring/iterating is a bear. I really like C# maui, but that community does not seem interested in anything but hot reload, so you still have to write the XML (XML!) by hand.
I wasn’t necessarily looking for a web based solution or to write webapps, but I am open to anything that can get the job done. Once I tried anvil I found that a lot of my philosophies lined up with it. I had previously written an app that had arbitrary python expressions in a table that would automatically update values, just like data bindings.
I’m (mostly) a career enterprise software support engineer, mostly at startups, and the way it’s usually done is to get some well known companies or people that others will listen to to be a champion for you. Something like “we’re a fortune 500 and we love anvil because reasons, read my article and watch my youtube talk recording.”
I figured the best thing I can do right now is give them $15/mo so they can increase their marketing budget I’m happy they have a free option, but the people who love it and want to see it succeed should put their money into it.
From what I’ve witnessed, success or failure for this kind of tech goes hand in hand with the company behind it, regardless as to how enthusiastic its community is.
So, until last December I was a developer advocate here, and — while the current team will be able to answer more comprehensively — I can tell you a bit about the kinds of things that would be most useful to Anvil from its community.
As everyone’s already mentioned - advocate for Anvil in your communities! Tell people about it, show them things you’ve built; if you have the chance to do any public speaking (meetups, conferences, etc) then getting the word out about Anvil there is really awesome.
Writing about Anvil, if that’s your inclination, is also incredible; write tutorials, write testimonials about how it’s helped you solve a problem, etc etc. If you’ve written something and don’t have somewhere to put it, tell the team and they might put it on the Anvil blog.
Finally, tell the team where you think you should be seeing Anvil. If there are newsletters, blog posts, conferences, etc where Anvil would be a good fit but it just isn’t there, let the team know. If you can get this kind of insight from others in your communities, that’s even better.