HACKER Q&A
📣 alfageme

Modern framework to create forms and store its results


After a few years of working as a physio for others, my partner is finally starting her clinic soon. The question for the software she needs to run the whole thing arises. /me wanting to help as much as I can, I've looking for the best options for accounting, CMS, payroll...

But for the "initial interview" she conducts with all incoming patients to gather information for a diagnostic. I haven't found any candidates that fit her needs. I'm thinking of building a small tool with her tailor-made questions easy to use and maintain.

Across the different projects I've worked for, I've seen lots of basic CRUD/form web apps being built with different stacks and general-purpose frameworks, but all ended up being hard to maintain and bloated in features. Maybe Django forms were the exception to that rule. I also took a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/8ghoy1/looking_for_self_hosted_form_builders and tried a few of the options outlined there but none convinced me.

Do you guys know some modern and OSS form-builder I can use for this?

TL;DR: I'm looking for something like MS Access but modern, self-hosted and -hopefully- better looking to build custom forms, store and consume results.


  👤 mxek Accepted Answer ✓
Hi, co-founder of DETA(deta.sh) here; we have a horse in this race, nonetheless are trying to make creating and hosting micro-backends super simple. Currently DETA ships with a micro-crud app based on a Flask-like router.

Auto-generated UI forms and data inspection are on our radar--we'd be more happy to give you access!


👤 onion2k
The tech you use to build it matters a lot less than whether or not your partner likes to use it. The user experience is more important than the developer experience (both matter, but the user one is more important). Show your partner examples and ask them which one they like more, and use that data to drive the choice of tech.

👤 matijash
Once you store the survey results, what happens next? If you just used typeform (https://www.typeform.com/) (they have a really nice UX), what would you be missing?

👤 pettycashstash2
Flask is great. Simple and zero bloat.