5 Open Source Projects Which Can Redefine Web Development in 2022
Appsmith, Supabase, Appwrite, Plasmic, and Hasura
Over the past few years, open-source projects have been an essential driving force behind modern web development. In the beginning, jQuery was the most popular project in the world.
But today, we have several popular projects like React, Vue, Next.Js, Django, Express, etc. These projects improved the way we dealt with the frontend, backend and made it easier to implement new and innovative features.
This year, we are likely to see some significant innovations in web development, especially with low-code, which can reduce development time and be easily scaled. These innovations will come from big players, some from startups, and some from open-source projects gaining popularity over the past few years. In this blog, I’ve rounded up five (listed in alphabetical order) of the most promising open-source web development projects that are definitely going to make a bigger splash this year!
Appsmith
Stars: 24k | GitHub Repository | Community
Appsmith is an open-source framework to quickly build any custom business software like admin panels, internal tools, dashboards, and more with pre-built UI widgets that connect to any database, GraphQL or REST API, controlling everything with Javascript.
Such software is often used in pretty much every organization (as well as for hobby projects). Often, developers spend countless hours on something like React or Angular to create these applications.
Today, Appsmith has over 15+ Datasources and 35+ UI widgets. It’s great for teams and individuals who love to build personal or customizable internal apps hosted on their own platforms. Appsmith also offers a free cloud community edition with all the essential features needed to build a perfect internal tool.
How can Appsmith re-define web dev?
Almost every organization or individual needs an internal application at some point; instead of building everything from scratch, this open-source low-code tool is the best go-to solution. It will cut development costs, save time, and let developers and businesses focus on more important things.
Appwrite
GitHub Stars: 15.3k+ | GitHub| Community
Appwrite is an open-source, end-to-end backend server for frontend and mobile developers that allows you to build apps much faster. Its goal is to abstract and simplify everyday development tasks behind REST APIs and tools, helping developers build advanced apps faster.
This beautiful framework will save a considerable amount of developers time by bootstrapping all the backend needs, including database, storage, users, geo and localization, functions, console, privacy, and security. Today, the Appwrite server is packaged as a Docker container that you can easily set up using a simple docker-compose command from your terminal, either on your local machine or any cloud provider.
The Appwrite team plans to launch a cloud version to cut down all the additional configurations needed for self-hosting.
How can Appwrite re-define web dev? Developing and maintaining a backend-end is not an easy task. In 2022, relying on tools like Appwrite is the best way to ship applications faster. This not only saves time but gives developers complete control on the backend on the scale with very simple customizations.
Hasura
Stars: 25k+ | GitHub | Community
Hasura doesn’t need much of an introduction, it’s been here for a while, and is definitely one of the most loved projects in the open-source community.
The Hasura GraphQL Engine is a blazing-fast GraphQL server that gives you instant, realtime GraphQL APIs over Postgres, with webhook triggers on database events and remote schemas for business logic.
So if you need a super-fast GraphQLAPI engine without writing any code, Hasura is the go-to solution. Over the last year, Hasura has become strong with its features like serverless functions, fine-grained access control, admin UI & migrations, and many more!
Hasura can run anywhere, from your local machine to the Heroku free tier to a server on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. It is used and loved by technologists working for some of the world’s largest enterprises & most exciting startups.
How can Hasura re-define web dev? Hasura is already a well-established tool for building powerful GraphQL APIs. In 2022, based on my experience and connections, several developer communities plan to migrate to GraphQL-based backends for their speed and scalability.
Plasmic
Stars: 950+ | GitHub
Plasmic lets non-developers visually build pages and other presentational content, which developers can then render into existing websites and web application codebases.
Plasmic accepts logic, data, and behaviour with custom code for more complex digital component interactions. Depending on the framework you’re using, you can also extend Plasmic by creating your own UI components in it.
Designers, marketers, product managers, and more can use Plasmic to create pages — from landing pages to content pages to page templates; this saves a lot of time and back and forth communication between teams. Simply put, Plasmic can be a developer-friendly Webflow alternative that gives full control over the frontend.
The most common use case is consuming Plasmic designs like CMS content over an API. Still, you can also generate code into your codebase or even publish pages to platforms like Shopify. Plasmic ultimately aims to be the most versatile builder and integrate into any environment.
How can Plasmic re-define web dev? Plasmic can be a revolutionary product for the web. It empowers marketers, designers, content teams to ship applications directly and free up developers from pixel-pushing. While it’s easy to start with, Plasmic gives you tools never before seen in any design tool or page builder to let you create maintainable front ends at scale.
Supabase
Stars: 26.3K+ | GitHub | Discord
Supabase is an open-source alternative to Firebase and is designed to allow for a quick setup of your backend. It primarily focuses on providing the four essentials at scale: Database (Postgres), Auth, File Storage, and auto-generated APIs.
All these can be easily set up and put in use directly from their excellent dashboard without writing any piece of code. Off-course these can be customized and tailored accordingly by adding our code-flavour.
Not just that, Supabase also comes with a Client, which makes it simple for developers to build secure and scalable products. If you’re new and getting started, I recommend this free course on egghead.
Today Supabase can either be on the cloud version or self-hosted on our own infrastructure using Docker. More details here. Not just the product, Supabase has great documentation and community. They open-source almost everything they build, even their UI library, Dashboard!
How can Supabase redefine web dev? Supabase is the best open-source alternative to Google’s Firebase and offers some great features that other real-time database solutions just don’t have. With this, developers can spend more time on focusing more the product rather than configuring the backend.
Thanks for reading this one! I would love to hear your thoughts.
