Personal intro and advice request

Coffee Lounge
#1

Hello Wappler Community!

I apologize in advance for this long post, which will serve as my introduction to this forum, and as a request for advice.

I am considering becoming a Wappler user but would love to get your views on whether it’s the right option for me. The 14-day trial won’t be enough for me to learn Wappler, so before joining, I’d appreciate your advice.

Regarding my background, I am 47, I grew up in France but spent most of my adult life in Spain, and for the past six years I’ve been living in Melbourne, Australia. I am not a developer, but I want to be able to build some basic web apps for personal projects (eg tracking my expenses and my trips), and for some non-profit organisations I’m engaged with.

My experience of coding is limited to some Basic on an Amstrad when I was a kid, and quite a bit of Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), mostly writing macros for Excel. Over 15 years ago I also built a complete application with VBA in Microsoft Access, which ended up being used by around 60 concurrent users in a call centre (clearly a mistake I wouldn’t want to repeat). More recently I’ve been trying Google Apps Script (with a lot of help from ChatGPT). But I’ve been frustrated to be unable to build a proper web app that would be available from anywhere.

I initially looked at several no-code platforms like Bubble, but I want control of the code and hosting. I stumbled upon Wappler a couple of months ago, and I’ve been watching videos, reading documentation and reading this forum. It looks like it could be a good fit. Apart from the freedom of controlling the code and the hosting, I’m hoping it can help me learn to code at a basic level, somewhat similarly to how I learnt VBA by recording macros and then looking at the code that was generated and tweaking it. Is that too optimistic?

My doubts regarding Wappler are the following:

  1. Given my experience, do you think I can successfully build basic apps with Wappler?
  2. My experience of hosting is very limited. At present I have a shared hosting plan (with Hostpapa), which I use to build and maintain websites in Wordpress and Joomla. Can I expect to be able to deploy web apps through Wappler with this limited knowledge?
  3. How much should I budget per month for hosting my apps, knowing that they will have very low usage? The Wappler subscription is a significant cost for a hobby, so I’d like to make sure that the total cost of my hobby is not unreasonable.

I’d love to hear your opinions, thank you!

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#2

Welcome to our humble abode.

  1. A resounding YES
  2. You can keep using Hostpapa
  3. The same amount that you are paying now

Ben
Mount Eliza Vic

2 Likes
#3

Yes to everything.

But you need to be up for a challenge. You are not just going to build some dynamic websites you are going to learn how to build them and deploy them. You must be ready for hitting roadblocks and having to wait for replies in the community. And the quality of the replies will be tightly linked to the quality of the question which for new users is usually poor…but that is expected and the supporting community is aware of that.

If you have an impatient personality this is not for you. On the other side if you are a self-learner and patient you should be fine!

And as you are most probably considering PHP as your server model these will be the last words we will speak :joy:

Joking! Also…no estoy de coña.

Good luck buddy!

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#4

Thanks for the advice @JonL! I am incredibly patient so hopefully it will work out :wink:
And at this stage I’m thinking of Node.js for the server-side, so with some luck you will approve…

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#5

If patience is your virtue you are already half there.

Most users that end up abandoning Wappler is due to lack of patience. Of course for a lot of people that is justified if that lack of patience is caused by losing money so I can understand them.

image

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#6

I believe you can be. If you have some background in coding and are someone who’s up for reading, asking questions, and trying things, then you should be fine.

Wappler makes deploying fairly easy. You will need to signup at hosting providers like DigitalOcean, but after that, you can set up servers in Wappler’s Resource Manager and click one button to have whatever you’ve developed locally migrated to the cloud host. There are some other things like purchasing a domain and assigning it to the web host that Wappler will not do for you, but it’s not too difficult and we can help when you get to that step.

You do not need to budget anything in the beginning since you’ll be developing locally. I would recommend choosing Docker so it’s easier to deploy in the future. Once you’ve made it to a point where you’re ready to allow users to access your site, that is typically when you need to start paying for a web host. Pricing will vary based on the size of the server you create and whether you use items like managed databases or load balancers. Digital Ocean servers start at about $6 USD, not sure what that is in Australian currency. A more realistic pricing will probably be around $30-50 per month once you include managed databases, backups, load balancers, etc.

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#7

Oh by the way. If they are hobby/pet projects you don’t need to spend a dime on hosting. There are several options out there that will cost you 0.
So there’s that.

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#8

I use HostPapa exclusively for my projects. Only thing to consider is that with HostPapa shared hosting you do not have access to Node.js so you will want to use PHP. Sounds like what you want to acheive is fairly simple in Wappler. I am also not a coder. You will be fine here with Wappler. Ask lots of questions! :wink:

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#9

This is what I get from my search:

HostPapa is another one of the rare providers that offers Node.js hosting on shared plans. HostPapa strikes a good balance between the customization that you need to write your own Node.js code, and the ease of use that you’d expect from a shared server.

If that is not the case, @CedricT is welcome to use my cloud based host, the head office which is located in Hallam, an hour South East of Melbourne…

#10

Welcome to Wappler!

I do not come from a coding background and so far I have developed multiple web applications using Wappler. As mentioned in the previous posts, if you are prepared to spend time to read, try out new things and ask questions, then the outcome will be definitely worth your time and efforts.

I live in the South-Eastern suburb of Melbourne. Please don’t hesitate to reach out.

3 Likes
#11

Have a look at the last Meetup, Jon’s (@sitestreet) presentation will dazzle you:

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#12

Regarding why choosing NodeJS I also recently mentioned something that is worth considering: advanced support from the community.

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#13

FWIW I don’t agree with Jon. PHP is much simpler to setup and much cheaper to run. IMHO, the learning curve for Node.js is not worth it for sites that can easily be run in PHP. I say this as someone who developed a complete site in PHP then tried to port it to Node.js and eventually gave up.

Having asked many, many, (many…) questions in the forums about both PHP and Node.js I haven’t noticed any difference in the quantity or quality of responses.

That’s my 2C.

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#14

I don’t understand what you mean with learning curve. The learning curve for nodejs is exactly the same as with php given that it’s all abstracted behind Server Connect.

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#15

I’ve never had to use terminal commands to set up a PHP site. :woman_shrugging:

#16

Ah you mean deploying? Yeah. It’s true that at the beginning around the time node and docker was released in Wappler things were a bit rough around the corners for non-developers. But right now there shouldn’t be much difference between node and php deployment if you use docker and the hosting options that are available in the server manager.

We should consider those(docker and server manager hosting options) as the standard from a Wappler perspective as it’s where the team has been focusing these last years.

Or are you referring to other terminal commands?

#17

I wasn’t referring to the quality and quantity of the community support in general. That is top-notch for both server models.

As you can see I was referring to advance support. Basically for things that Wappler doesn’t provide out-of-the box or that if it does there are better ways to achieve the same result. The typical help you can only get from experienced programmers. And those really favor nodejs over php. Here…and anywhere :slight_smile:

#18

I honestly haven’t tried with using docker/heroku so that might be a whole lot easier than what I tried which was using my current host and installing via cPanel. I did get it up and running but was then unable to get sockets.io working because my host doesn’t allow it (which I figured out after MANY hours, grrr) and that was my main reason for going with Node.

From what I understand you have to pay for each site that’s deployed with Heroku, rather than being able to host a whole bunch on one cPanel account. Is that correct? I know they used to have a “hobby” account but I believe that’s gone now.

In any case, my point stands that in my experience there is excellent support for PHP on the forums. :grinning:

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#19

Shared hosting providers are a bit 🫤 when it comes to nodejs support.

Also CPanel was lagging behind and took its time to provide a good solution for node. I believe that is all solved now and cpanel is a valid solution for nodejs.

Not that I have used it recently. I believe the last time I used Cpanel was to host a Xoops website for a gaming clan :joy: That was like 20 years ago give or take.

I tend to stay away from shared hosting as a general rule and for serious projects you should anyway. That means of course that hosting will be more expensive. But that doesn’t mean that nodejs is more expensive. It means that you are paying for better infrastructure.

Websockets tend to consume more resources than regular connections and as it’s a different protocol it also requires more effort regarding security. Those are the main reasons why shared hosting don’t normally allow them. They wouldn’t allow them either if they were on PHP. So again not a problem of nodejs really :slight_smile:

Heroku unfortunately deprecated the free plan. That was a real shame.

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#20

Yeah - for high use production sites you have a point but OP said their sites were hobby sites and they’re concerned about cost so shared hosting seems like a good solution in this case.

FYI - It was only like 2 months ago I tried to use Node.js. LOL!

Hope your week ahead goes well. H.

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