I've been coder for the last 30 years, using PHP for the last 20 years and using symfony for the last 11 years.
But I feel there's the trend of "no-code" now that allows rapid prototyping with "working MVPs" (not only fake wireframes).
Backend
For the backend, I feel Strapi allows me to build any API in a matter of an afternoon no matter what's the sector of the business. Also I feel that n8n allows me to build any "logic" behind the Strapi models in 1 afternoon receiving events from Strapi and connecting to MySQL, ElasticSearch, etc.
All those no-code tools are free software and open source.
It just works. MVP in 24h
Any small idea you come up with, say a physical school for kids:
- You set in Strapi: teachers, courses, classrooms, children, parents, exams, books, and boom, done.
- You set in n8n the logic for all the possible state changes like: "When a teacher creates an exam write a MySQL row and later send an email to parents with the date they'll receive the marks" and boom done.
You spend 1 day... And it works!
Frontend???
But what about the frontend?
With this I end up with an API that works with no frontend attached.
I am still used to create a frontend in Symfony just to call the API and paint the entities via twig. This takes maybe a full week or maybe 2. You have to deal with every single small css bit, evey single javascript, etc.
I need an open source tool that allows me to create a nice user-facing frontend with zero-coding as the Strapi and n8n thing.
Question
What is the "de-facto" standard to create full nice API-based applications based in "no-code" that one can use to build "something useful for the end user (ie: VMP)" in a couple of afternoons?
